PM reaffirms importance of SOEs, strong sanctions needed to spur equitization

He said the number of SOEs dripped to less than 600 from more than 1,200 thanks to the Government's rearrangement and reform efforts over the past years.

The Government chief stressed business leaders must toss and turn so that SOEs really play a key role in the national economy after pointing out several weaknesses like limited governance, bad debt, losses, lack of transparency and low technological capacity.

The aforesaid weaknesses were attributed to both subjective and objective reasons, including corruption, disobedience of Government's directions, poor awareness of reform and innovation and loose State management.

The Government will continue to crack down on corruption while focusing on reviewing and improving mechanisms and policies in a bid to fix these shortcomings and weaknesses, PM Phuc said.

As many SOEs have "backyards", PM Phuc called for stricter inspection of SOEs to ensure serious compliance with legal regulations and timely punishment of violations.

All obstacles of the SOE equitization process must be timely reported to the Government and sanctions shall be strong to deal with SOE leaders who are intentionally slow in carrying out equitization.

PM Phuc tasked competent authorities to quickly summarize recommendations of economic corporations and groups to serve as input for amending legal regulations on evaluation of the values of land use rights and trademarks, equitization and divestment procedures, financial management to prevent loopholes and repeat of violations in the equitization and divestment process.

(Source: VGP)