ISLAMABAD, June 17: The Privatisation Commission holds on Saturday bidding for 26 per cent shares with management control of the country’s most profitable entity, the Pakistan Telecommunication Company.
This will be the country’s largest ever privatization transaction both in size and strategic value and is expected to yield about $3-3.5 billion (over Rs180 billion).
The Cabinet Committee on Privatization (CCOP) headed by Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz will meet just before the bidding to approve a reference price for the PTCL shares.
The CCOP will meet again, most probably, on Monday to consider results of the bidding.
The bidding will begin at 06:45pm at a local hotel and will be restricted to representatives of the bidders, government officials concerned and accredited journalists on special invitation.
Special security arrangements have been made to keep protesting PTCL workers away from the hotel.
No live coverage of the bidding will be allowed despite requests from several TV channels. However, video-tapes of the bidding process will be provided to media after the event.
A Privatisation Commission official said the bidding would begin soon after the CCOP meeting to minimize the possibility of leakage of the reference price.
The reference price proposed by a consortium of financial advisers was finalized by the board of the Privatisation Commission at a meeting on Friday, presided over by Minister for Privatisation and Investment Dr Abdul Hafeez Sheikh and attended by IT Minister Awais Leghari.
The board declared three pre-qualified bidders — Etisalat of the UAE, China Mobile of China and Sing Tel of Singapore — as eligible to take part in the bidding as they had submitted $40 million (Rs2.4 billion) each as earnest money.
Meanwhile, PTCL workers have decided to hold protest demonstrations on Saturday in different parts of the country.
A meeting between the leadership of the PTCL Workers Unions Action Committee and high-level government officials was in progress till the filing of this report with no signs of any breakthrough.
The participants have not disclosed the venue of the meeting, which, according to sources, has been organized by a political party from the ruling coalition after taking guarantee from the government that no union leader will be arrested if the talks fail.
Latif Qureshi, a member of the action committee, who was attending the meeting, told this correspondent that the action committee had sent its demands to the government.
“We do not accept the package announced by the government,” he said but added: “The PTCL privatisation could be accepted subject to acceptance of workers’ demands.
A PTCL spokesman said law-enforcement agencies had released a number of PTCL workers in Karachi, Rawalpindi and Islamabad after a protest demonstration by children of the employees in front of the Parliament House.
PROTEST TO EMBASSIES: The action committee and the Anti-Privatisation Alliance on Friday lodged protests with the embassies of Singapore, China and United Arab Emirates from where companies are participating in the PTCL bidding.
In their letters to the embassies, the committee and the alliance ‘condemned the undemocratic and oppressive methods adopted by the government in its haste to sell off the company.’
They demanded an immediate withdrawal of the bidders in deference to the principles of democracy and said: “While the state has done everything within its means to crush the resistance against PTCL’s privatisation, the vast majority of workers remains adamantly opposed to privatisation and will remain hostile to the new management, thereby, hampering its operations.”
