The Political Economy of Privatization by Debt Settlement Method

This study uses the grounded theory to find the similarities between the processes through which the ownership of different state-owned companies has been transferred as debt settlement, and the challenges with which these companies have been dealing after the transfer. The data that have been used for the analysis is based on the interviews with the relevant officials, organizational documents, and other evidence pertaining to the transfer of the ownership of four companies to pension funds (Aseman Airways, Tabriz Machinery, Raja Railway Transport, Iran Tobacco. This paper's main findings are: (1) all of the transfers have been made without competition and the consent of pension funds; (2) the transfers have been made despite severe problems with which the companies had been dealing, although, according to the explicit content of the law, structural reform is the prerequisite of the ownership transfer; (3) the privatization organization has not supervised the performance of the transferred companies; (4) the transfers have been made without evaluating whether the buyers met the qualification requirements; (5) there was not a single procedure for financial evaluation of the companies; and (6) there was not an appropriate process for the delegation of the public responsibilities of the companies to the relevant governance sectors. In fact, in all of the transfers we have studied, the government has neglected the prerequisites, and privatization in the sense of transferring the ownership to the private sector to improve efficiency has not happened, and the government has violated its commitments to achieve the main goal of privatization (which is financing the budget deficit).