Activation of state property remains one of the major sources of reducing public debt, says Croatia’s finance minister Zdravko Marić
Restructuring and Sales Center (CERP) has resumed the sale of majority shares in the three tourist companies – Hoteli Makarska, Hotel Group Maestral in Dubrovnik and Hotel Jadran in Crikvenica, reports Poslovni.hr on November 6, 2017.
Regarding Hoteli Makarska, it’s about 55.5% of share capital, almost 69% of Maestral Hotel Group, and 70,7% of Hotel Jadran. Investors are to express their interest through letters of intent for a period of up to November 13, which will be followed by a decision on the initial price, conditions and implementation of the procedure for collecting binding offers. Even if the offers are satisfactory and the competition ends with the ultimate change of majority owners in those companies, this will obviously not be realized by the end of this year, which is yet another in a series of over-optimistically planned privatization revenues.
As Finance Minister Zdravko Marić has said during this year’s budget amendment process, less than 400 million kunas was earned from privatization. The financing bill for 2017 envisaged HRK 1.4 billion of privatization revenues, same as last year, when the plan also failed to reach the target (HRK 345m was collected). With the amended budget adopted at the last week’s Government’s session, the proceeds from the sale of shares were decreased to HRK 800m.
With regard to the score achieved so far and less than two months to the end of the year, the Ministry of State Property, on which estimates the projections of privatization revenues are based on, will not easily reach even such reduced figures. However, for the coming year, the projections of proceeds from the sale of shares are somewhat less ambitious – set for 1 billion HRK, and the same amount is foreseen for 2019 and 2020. Nevertheless, the finance minister reiterates that “the issue of activation of state property and privatization revenues remains as one of the three major sources of reducing public debt along with economic growth and fiscal consolidation.”
Translated from Poslovni Dnevnik
