Head of the State Property Fund: of more than 1,000 objects up for privatization, only about a quarter are valuable
9 February 16:43
The newly appointed head of the State Property Fund of Ukraine, Dmytro Natalukha, has publicly outlined for the first time the real state of assets under the SPFU’s management and reported that only a small portion of them are suitable for effective sale. The official wrote about this on Facebook, according to
According to him, his first three weeks in office have made it clear that “the scale of the problems at the Fund is enormous.”
“More than two thousand objects are under the management of the Fund, of which about half are either bankrupt, in liquidation, in temporarily occupied territories, or under arrest. Hundreds of millions of square meters of state-owned real estate, scattered chaotically throughout the country, millions of hectares of state-owned land, which is often cultivated in the gray, if not black, economy,” he said.
How much of this can actually be sold
Despite the fact that more than a thousand objects are included in the privatization list, most of them are not marketable.
“Of the thousand objects up for privatization, only about a quarter of them are of any value to the budget,” said the head of the Fund.
Moreover, even among this part, a significant number are problematic.
“60% of this quarter has serious problems that make their sale either impossible or extremely difficult and costly,” he clarified.
Typical problems with assets include large debts or a virtual absence of assets.
“There are companies that have more debt than assets. And some that have no assets at all. There are those where managers do not allow Fund representatives onto their premises,” Natalukha added.
The biggest obstacle to privatization is the debt of strategic enterprises.
“Anything that is not a strategic asset is either a loan or a debt. And somehow it turns out that the state is constantly indebted mainly to the same people,” he noted.
According to him, a small group of creditors effectively controls key state-owned enterprises:
“A handful of sanctioned emigrants are using artificial debts to hold enterprises that could be the pearls of the Ukrainian economy by the throat.”
What’s next
The head of the SPF acknowledged that it will not be possible to change the situation quickly.
“The depth and magnitude of the problem is simply enormous. The Fund alone cannot change this.
Instead of pimping, we will try to approach state capital with something like the Montessori system… The environment plays a key role. This means that it will have to be improved first,” he promised.
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