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Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin - photo : neftegaz.ru |
The Russian government has recently announced a new privatisation drive that could see stakes in some of the country's top state-controlled companies sold off for as much as $58 billion in all.
The plan lists privatisation through the next three years and includes selling stakes of up to 50 per cent in some of the country's largest state companies, including Rosneft, the Rushydro power generator, the Sberbank and VTB banks, and Russian Railways.
After the first three-year stage, "it's possible that we will decrease most of the stakes to 25 per cent plus one share," RIA Novosti quoted Kudrin as saying at a forum in Moscow.
"Depending on how we manage through these three years, we'll go further," Kudrin said. "We want to make money from selling control" in these companies.
Until then, the state will retain stakes of 50 per cent plus one share in its most important assets, said Kudrin.
A total of 900 firms are in the privatisation program.
Russia largely halted privatisation after a chaotic sell-off of state-owned resources of the 1990s that critics say handed over large swathes of its huge natural wealth to a clique of insiders at knock-down prices.
But the government has now been forced to reverse this strategy due to the impact of the economic crisis, which plunged the budget into deficit.
The Vedomosti business daily said Wednesday the government is also considering swapping stakes in the Rosneft oil company and Russian Railways with foreign companies as a form of "flexible privatisation."
"Some of the shares would not be put onto the market but exchanged for shares of other companies, primarily foreign ones," the news paper quoted a government official as saying.
Such an approach would attract strategic investors and decrease government ownership at the same time, he said.
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