Guiding Principles – Steering Committees ÔÇô Privatization Methods

Guiding Principles

The privatization schedule of Cameroon rests on three guiding principles :

The first principle concerns the protection of the general interest. Privatization is not a mere transfer of ownership from the public sector to the private sector. The motives are manifold and go beyond the sole concern for the highest price.

The State is first and foremost concerned with the continuity of the enterprise. Its main concern is job security which responds to the criteria of efficiency and profitability of the company.

One of the major concerns of the State is the market invironment in which the company evolves in order to ensure efficient working conditions of the mechanisms and to avoid the state of monopoly.

The second principle concerns transparency. In order to ensure transparency during the privatization process, the regulation in force consecrates calls for competition and publicity through out the process : at the time of admission of the enterprise for privatization, during the launching of the invitation to tender and the provisional and final choice of the buyer.

The third principle is the prior assessment of the enterprise to be privatized. This is carried out by professionals outside the administration.

The steering committees

For an enterprise to be privatized, the Technical Committee puts in place a steering committee which is a framework of dialogue, that takes into consideration relevant opinions of the principal stakeholders of the privatization.

Thus, in addition to the experts of the Technical Committee, a representative of the Ministry assuming technical supervision, the corporation\’s management participate in the preparation of the tender documents, in the analysis of the bids and the technical preparation of the negotiation documents with the buyers.

Privatization methods

They take into account the nature of the companies to be privatized (State Corporations, semi-public Corporations, Public establishments.) They can therefore take the following forms :

• partial or total transfer of the shares held by the State and/or public establishments;
• partial or total transfer of assets;
• leasing or run by a manager;
• merger/demerger/absorption;
• admission of shareholders or increase of their shares in the enterprise\’s assets;

In this framework, the transfer of shares can benefit to national private investors, civil servants, the staff of the enterprise to be privatized or to foreign investors.

For more information: www.ctpl-cm.org