Govt retains three key state-owned enterprises in public sector

The government on Monday dec­ided to keep three federal entities — Trading Corpo­ration of Pakistan (TCP), Small and Medium Enter­prise Development Auth­o­rity (Smeda) and Pakis­tan National Shipping Corpo­ration (PNSC) — in the public sector by declaring them as “essential state-owned enterprises (SOEs)”. The decision was made at a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on State-Owned Enterprises presided over by Finance Minister Muhammad Aur­a­n­gzeb, which also appr­oved the appointment of the board of directors of EXIM Bank of Pakistan and Karachi Port Trust. As part of the SOEs’ policy 2023 introduced on the directives of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the federal government is required to categorise all SOEs into four categories to reduce their footprint on the economy and reduce financial losses. For this, each relevant ministry is tasked with presenting its rationale to the committee for assigning the SOEs to a specific category.