All 84 SOEs found not up to the mark

The Cabinet Committee on the state-owned enterprises has found out that the overall performance of all 84 state-owned enterprises is unsatisfactory despite huge fiscal injections.
These enterprises are functioning under the administrative control of 19 federal ministries.
The finding came in a committee meeting called to discuss the governance reforms on the state-owned enterprises and the reconstitution of the Board of Directors of Sarmaya-i-Pakistan Limited.
It was unearthed in the meeting that during 2017-18 an amount of Rs 143 billion was provided to various SOEs as subsidies, Rs 204 billion as cash development loan, Rs 27 billion as equity injection and GoP guarantees amounting to Rs 318 billion were issued. Despite such large support, the SOEs sector as a whole registered net losses of Rs 265 billion.
The Ministry of Finance which gave its presentation attributed the poor performance of the SOEs to various factors such as redundancies and duplications, a completely decentralized governance framework with lack of inter-agency coordination, excessive interference and over-regulation by multiple government agencies and lack of technical expertise and specialized skills in the line ministries for the management of commercial CEOs.
The meeting was also attended by Dr. Ishrat Hussain who has been engaged in restructuring and reorganization of the federal government.
Dr Ishrat Hussain’s proposals which also include a plan for state-owned institutions have been approved by the cabinet. He informed the moot that the reforms suggested by his group were being implemented at different levels.
The federal government is to decide which SOEs should be privatized and which to be liquidated, wound up, or closed down and which were to be reorganized and retained by the government or merged with other entities.