National Assembly has no information on SOE sales
National Assembly has no information on SOE sales
It is difficult to access information about how much money the State has earned from selling state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and how the money has been used.
Under current laws, the money collected from SOE equitization must be handed in to the state budget, which will later be allocated to different fields.
However, a National Assembly’s Deputy, answering questions from the local press, said the state’s budget discussed by the National Assembly (NA) every year does not include receipts from SOE equitization.
A university lecturer, who is conducting research work on the SOE equitization process in Vietnam, also noted that while it is easy to find reports about the number of SOEs equitized and the number of shares sold, it is nearly impossible to find information about how the money from the equitization has been spent.
Mai Xuan Hung, deputy chair of the NA’s Economics Committee, said the source of income is included in the state budget’s receipts.
For example, the NA has reported that the total state budget’s revenue in 2015 would be VND900 trillion, of which VND30-40 trillion would be from SOE sales.
However, Hung said only amounts from the equitization of SOEs in the oil and gas sector are “remarkable”, while the revenue from other sectors are “insignificant”.
The money from the sectors has been either re-invested into unprofitable SOEs, or used to pay debts of big SOEs like Vinalines and Vinashin.
In many cases, local authorities have tried to retain money collected from the equitization of local businesses for several years to use as capital.
Also, according to Hung, a resolution applied specifically to the oil and gas sector stipulates the percentage of revenue from SOE sales can be kept by enterprises for re-investment, and how much money enterprises must pay back to the state budget.
The resolution is not applied to the equitization of the SOEs in other business fields.
Therefore, “there is only a report about the total amount of money collected from the equitization, while the money from the SOE equitization is unclear,” he said in Dat Viet newspaper.
The NA Deputy also commented that the money from the equitization has been used ineffectively, at a time when Vietnam still has to borrow money from foreign sources to implement development projects. He noted that this is a big waste of the society’s resources.
In reply, Hung said that investment inefficiency can be seen in all business fields of the national economy and with all sources of money, not only with money sourced from the equitization process.
