On October 4, the inaugural meeting of the project office for privatization took place at the Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture under the chairmanship of the First Deputy Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture Pavlo Kukhta. The event gathered representatives of the Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture, SE Prozorro.Sales, the State Property Fund (SPFU), the Deposit Guarantee Fund (DGF), Reform Support Team within the Ministry of Economic Development and a number of consultants participating in the project.

The purpose of the meeting is to organize and start project work on the soonest possible start of privatization of state-owned enterprises, which are within the spheres of management of various central executive authorities.

Pavlo Kukhta informed that there are about 3,600 state-owned enterprises in Ukraine that demonstrate different financial and operational efficiency indicators - from the few successful ones to the vast majority of unprofitable and completely neglected ones. The Ministry of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture is currently preparing nearly 800 state-owned companies for privatization, offering to organize and structure this process as a single project involving all responsible authorities.

“The project activities will allow us to quickly and efficiently implement and control all stages of preparation of enterprises for privatization, to establish effective communication among different concerned authorities and to provide a positive result as soon as possible. We will finally kick start the process, which has to have been launched and completed in the nineties of the last century, thereby having reduced the extremely inefficient public sector in the economy and having attracted the necessary investments for growth”, explained Pavlo Kukhta.

The participants of the meeting approved the structure and main directions of work on the preparation of enterprises for small and large privatization.

"We have the experience of successful work in the field of small-scale privatization, which has already brought more than 1.5 billion hryvnias earnings into budgets of different levels during the year", said Oleksiy Sobolev, Director of SE Prozorro.Sales. "We have agreed a clear plan of action that envisages the transfer of assets to the SPFU by their governing bodies, preparation for sale and elimination of potential problems and risks, direct sale through small and large-scale privatization procedures."