Lukashenka secretly selling assets :: Charter'97 :: News

Belarus sold another enterprise to a foreign investor. Thus, the “Mobile Digital Communication” (MDC) company which has been in the Belarusian market since 1999 under the VELCOM brand has acquired the status of a foreign company. The information about the deal penetrated to the Belarusian mass media two days ago though this fact was not confirmed to the journalists either by the company itself or by Belarusian state bodies. According to the experts, the super-secrete procedure of the deal -making accounts for the official Minsk not willing to be caught at state assets selling right after the debts repayment to the Gazprom for gas deliveries.

Previously the MDC was a joint Belarusian –Cyprus venture with 49% belonging to the foreign investor (SB- Telecom), the “Nezavisimoya Gazeta” newspaper runs. At his April press-conference with the Belarusian journalists Alyaksandr Lukashenka reported on the might-be selling of the state share of the company. According to him, the potential buyer was going to pay USD 300-500 million for the sate share of the company .But the official Minsk, according to Lukashenka, was ready for bargaining the USD 500 million price of the company.

The profile ministry representatives did their best to make the Nezavisimoya Gazeta sure that the selling of the company is only intended and it has not been sold, yet. Nevertheless at the MDC site the company is advertised as the”foreign private unitary venture”.

According to the experts, the super-secrete procedure of the deal making accounts for the official Minsk not willing to be caught at state assets selling right after the debts repayment to the Gazprom for gas deliveries. There hasn’t been any official information, yet, on where Minsk, begging Moscow for the half-billion credit. got the money for its debts setting off. It seems quite natural that after the information about the deal had appeared the local observers immediately linked those two events together.

Minsk intention to keep the fact of selling the profitable enterprise (the state annually got USD 17 million in the form of dividends) share secrete is caused, according to the experts, by the fact that the deal manifests Lukashenka’s violation of his previously declared principle.”We shall sell only those ventures which we can’t manage ourselves”, the Belarusian ruler used to say. As far as the mobile communication operators are concerned , it was no later than in 2004 when Lukashenka by his edict returned the MDS share to the state thus making the majority stock of the company the ownership of the state without any reimbursement to previous owners. The communication ministry officials were consequently punished for their reportedly illegal selling of the company shares to the foreign investor and depriving the state of its control over the company as well as over the dividends.

Such sharp changes to the policy may prove that the independent experts who had declared before that Lukashenka would come to selling out Belarusian assets for his remaining in power after Russia’s refusal to subsidize his economic miracle were right. The turn of selling the “family silver”, i.e. oil refineries, has not come, yet .They is still selling small things. But the experts report that the problematic issues of the Belarusian economy have been accumulating at the initial stage: the profitability of the most profitable oil refining industry is decreasing; the goods and services export can’t improve the negative international trade balance which increases as a rolling snowball.

Being in the information vacuum the experts make other suppositions. They recall Lukashenka’s spring meeting with the foreign owner of the Company Id Samavi .They welt on large scale investments of the Cyprus Company into other branches of the Belarusian economy: hotel business, production of building materials. The MDC selling is supposed by certain experts to be the advance for the forthcoming large investments which are badly needed by the Belarusian economy.

Anyway, the state retains its control over the mobile communication market even after selling the statutory fund share of one of its 4 enterprises. Thus the “youngest” operator BeST , 51% of the Russian- Belarusian MTS company and 50% of the Belsel Belarusian-Dutch joint venture remain in the state’s hands.