The Privatization Commission’s Board on Thursday met and took decisions to expedite the privatization of the House Building Finance Corporation, Pakistan International Airlines, and three international airports, those at Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. While HBFC and PIA are at an advanced stage of sell-off, the airports are next. All the decisions of the Board are to be ratified by the Cabinet Committee on Privatization, and then by the full Cabinet itself, but they are expected to go through as recommended.
HBFC is the closest to being privatized, through a negotiated sale to a single pre-qualified bidder approved in July 2023, to the Pakistan Mortgage Refinance Corporation Limited. It would be more in the nature of a merger, for the PMRCL is itself over 43 percent owned by government entities (the Finance Ministry and National Bank), and 0.16 percent of its shares are owned by HBFC itself. The Board set a reference price, which will be compared to the reference price submitted by the PMRCL. It may be remembered that when the government tried to sell PIA last year, it received only one bid, of $36 million, which was far below the reference price of $305 milllion, so the sale fell through. This time around, there is a great effort at making the sale, which may explain why the Board allowed the addition of AKD Group Holdings to join the consortium headed by Arif Habib Corporation. With the auction date not set, but to take place before the end of the year, bringing in the AKD Group would be cutting a little fine. The decision to sell off the airports management ahead of p;ower distribution companies is a little puzzling, for the government had announced that it would sell off a number of distribution companies this year.
The government’s seriousness in selling off the family silver is less out of ideological commitment than because of a commitment with the IMF. It is true that the government has no business in the business of business, but the government needs to ensure that it is not carrying out privatizations just because the IMF told it to do so. For example, now that PIA has turned a profit, the rationale for privatizing it, to get away from the losses it makes, is a little lost. It should not be forgotten that once an asset is sold, it has gone forever, and there no chances of benefiting from it.
