The government cannot deal with strategic companies using
the same approach it adopts with the rest of the companies operating in the
national economy, as their importance varies in accordance with their
specialty.
اضافة اعلان
For example, Royal Jordanian Airlines, in which the Kingdom
has a near 80 percent stake, requires that the Treasury provide the necessary
financial allocations to support the continuity of the company, so long as the
government does not wish to operate it based solely on commercial standards.
Governmental intervention will not be free of charge. Since
the government has bought back the majority of stocks, which it sold to a major
investor in the privatization of 2008, it now has the duty to deal with the
publicly traded company as an integral part of the state’s administrative body,
or as a public sector institution.
Otherwise, the government must quit its stake in the company
by selling its shares to the private sector, and leave the management of Royal
Jordanian to be run purely on a commercial basis, without any governmental
interventions into the company’s decisions.
The government also has more than a 70 percent stake in the
Integrated Multi-Transport Company, which transports some 130,000 passengers
every day, the majority of which are from lower and middle-income segments. The
Greater Amman Municipality owns some 10 percent of the company as well.
The company has a large strategic importance in achieving
significant social balance in society, by transporting a large portion of the
population that cannot afford to buy their own vehicles.
Hence, the company is in need of direct financial support
from the government, because the various defense laws have led to a drop in its
revenues amounting to more than 75 percent at times, constituting major
financial burdens that increased the company’s various financial liabilities,
and reduced its capacity to continue investing in improving and developing
transport services, and updating its various fleets and facilities.
This requires that the government look into the
particularity of this strategic company from an economic, social, and political
perspective.
The national giant that is the oil refinery has constituted
one of the key pillars of Jordanian economic stability throughout decades, made
sure that the Kingdom was never short of oil derivatives, and incurred
government burdens and debts that would have been unbearable for any other
entity.
Today, this major company is ushering in a key transitional
phase for the national economy through its fourth expansion investment project,
at an initial value of $2.6 billion, deemed the largest in the Kingdom and the
most important of His Majesty King Abdullah’s reign.
This project will not see the light of day unless the
government addresses it with all its strategic dimensions, and grants it
incentives, and facilitations that ensure its feasibility on the one hand, and
its swift implementation on the other.
The fourth expansion cannot be viewed with the same lens
through which other projects and other investors and traders in the energy
sector are viewed, and requires that the government constantly consider means
of granting the company all exemptions that would facilitate and expedite the
completion of the fourth expansion.
As long as the government wishes to intervene in directing
the decisions of these companies, it must pay the price of such interventions,
which, no doubt, have resulted in large financial burdens for them. Otherwise,
the government must leave the administrations of these companies to operate on
a commercial basis, independent from any ministerial intervention, and basing
every decision on economic feasibility, without any official pressures.
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