TEHRAN- Iranian President Hassan Rouhani instructed the country’s Finance and Economic Affairs Minister Farhad Dejpasand that the process of divesting state shares should be expedited, IRNA reported.

Rouhani called on Dejpasand to lay the ground in the stock market for this target rapidly.

Iranian Finance and Economic Affairs Ministry has announced that over 29.98 trillion rials (about $713.8 million) worth of the shares of state-run companies has been transferred to the private sector during the past Iranian calendar year (ended on March 19, 2020).

Finance and economic affairs minister has previously announced that offering the shares of state-owned companies, which are planned to be privatized, will be sped up.

He has also said that the government should amend its policies and methods of setting the prices and transferring the shares in the process of privatization.

In Iran, implementation of a privatization plan aimed at more productivity, investment making, job creation, promotion of trade balance, more competition in the domestic economy, and reducing financial and management burden on the government has been under the spotlight over the past decade.

The law on the implementation of the general policies of Article 44 of Iran's Constitution on privatizing state-owned companies was declared in 2006 in a bid to downsize the government and promote the private sector’s role in the national economy.

The government envisioned a large privatization program in the Fifth Five-Year National Development Plan (2010-2015), aiming to privatize about 20 percent of the state-owned firms each year. Under the present interpretation of the Article 44, some state-owned companies have been privatized to reduce their financial burden on the country’s budget and also increase their productivity. 

Downsizing the government is on the agenda, but a number of factors have been hindering the privatization trend in the country, among them, the government’s high interference in the management of the transferred companies is a challenging one.

MA/MA