Speakers at a seminar yesterday stressed the need for immediate privatisation of the Bangladesh Machine Tools Factory at Gazipur and Chittagong Steel Mills at Chittagong.

They said that as those two units had been incurring losses over the years and there was no alternative to privatising them.

If the buyers do not show interest to buy the units fearing huge liabilities the government should go for joint venture with private companies they noted

They also expressed their views in favour of formation of a task force to make proper recommendations for taking actions about the future of the two units

Commerce and Industries

Minister Tofael Ahmed, former industries minister Zahiruddin Khan. Prof Mozzafer Ahmad, Dr Debapriya Bhattachariya. Kazi Fazlur Rahman, former director of East Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation (EPIDC), Sharif Afzal Hossain, president of Bangladesh Chamber of Industry (BCI). and a number of former government officials who were involved in the implementation of the two projects participated in the discussion held at the CIRDAP auditorium.

Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPDl arranged the seminar to seek opinions on two independent studies on those projects conducted by Prof Nazrul Islam and AF Mujtahid under the auspices of the CPD

Tofael Ahmed said that the government was very much interested to privatise all lossmaking State-Owned-Enter-prises (SOE’s) but to implement the decision there should be a consensus among the major political parties.

He said that the issue would be placed before the parliament for debate and seeking sugges tions on could be done in this

The minister termed the previous government's decisions regarding closure of BMTF as timely and said that if it was not shut down at that time the factory would have incurred further losses

Explaining the reason behind the previous government’s decisions for closing down BMTF, the former industries minister said that the government could not spend the tax payers money in such a project which had - been incurring losses over the years.

CPD Executive Chairman Prof Rehman Sobhan. while explaining the background of the studies, said that there were many big projects in the country and even the government lost all interest in them after their implementation as they failed to produce the desired results.

CPD has taken an initiative to look into the performance of those projects and suggest steps for future actions, he said.

Rafiq Siddique. former managing director of BMTF. said that the BMTF was set up with wrong policies for which it could not produce the desired results.

Kazi Fazlur Rahman said that most of the heavy industrial projects in the country were set up with foreign aid and they never produced^ good results whether the aid came from socialistic countries like the Soviet Union or from the capitalistic countries like France and Germany.

"Actually the projects which were set up with foreign aid were not designed to be viable and there were no way to salvage those due to many loopholes at the implementation stage," he noted.

According to the study, the Bangladesh Machine Tools Factory incurred losses of more than Tk 300 crore and Chittagong Steel Mills Tk 434 crore since their inception.