PHUKET: China’s Olympic gold medallist Zhihui Hou broke her own snatch world record at weightlifting’s World Cup in Phuket on Monday, before North Korean Ri Song-Gum equalled it and won the women’s 49kg competition by earning a new record total.
Hou, who lifted 96kg in the snatch in July 2021 to win gold in Tokyo, lifted 97kg to take the lead at the World Cup, before Ri matched her effort.
Ri lifted 124kg in clean and jerk to earn a total of 221, a new world record in the weight category, while Hou lifted 120kg and finished second with a total of 217.
Hou qualified for this year’s Olympics as the best performing Chinese athlete.
Ri is not eligible for the Paris Games because North Korea entered the qualifying programme too late, the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) said in a statement.
Ri, who also holds the current world record in clean and jerk having lifted 125kg at the Asian Championships in February, attempted unsuccessfully to lift 126kg.
MOSCOW: Russia accused International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach on Tuesday of taking part in a “conspiracy” with Ukraine to exclude its strongest athletes from this year’s Paris Games.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova made the allegation after two Russian pranksters known as Vovan and Lexus published a recording of a conversation with Bach in which he was falsely led to believe he was speaking to an African sports official.
Bach said in the call that the IOC had established a special panel to monitor the media and the internet and ensure that Russian athletes who had made political statements in support of their government could not take part in the Olympics.
“We have also offered to the Ukrainian side — not only offered, but asked them — to provide us with their knowledge of the behaviour of such [Russian] athletes or officials,” Bach could be heard saying in English on the recording.
Zakharova posted on Telegram that Bach had “entered into a political-administrative and, apparently, criminal conspiracy with one specific party” — meaning Ukraine — “to exclude strong sports competitors from international competitions”.
She added: “The relationship of IOC president Bach with the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine and its officials, and the admissions of a ‘request to monitor Russian athletes’ should be the subject of a thorough investigation.”
Relations between Russia and the IOC have worsened sharply in the run-up to the Olympics, at which Russian and Belarusian athletes will compete as neutrals, without their flags and anthems, because of the war in Ukraine. They have also been banned from taking part in the opening parade.
Pre-empting the publication of the prank call, the IOC said last month that Bach had been the victim of a hoax.
The IOC has publicly announced the establishment of a review panel to evaluate the eligibility of every Russian or Belarusian athlete who qualifies for Paris. In order to be cleared to compete, athletes must not have actively supported the war in Ukraine and must not be contracted to any military or security agency.
As part of reforms urged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Privatisation Commission said on Tuesday that it was putting on the block a stake ranging from 51 per cent to 100pc of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA).
The disposal of the flag carrier is a step past elected governments have steered away from as likely to be highly unpopular, but progress on the privatisation will help pursue further funding talks with the IMF.
In a newspaper advertisement, the panel set a deadline of May 3 to receive statements of interest in PIA, which has piled up arrears of hundreds of billions of rupees, and it appointed EY Consulting as the financial adviser for the deal.
“The restructured PIA is being offered to potential investors in its ‘debt-lite’ new structure for a 51pc-plus stake,” the Privatisation Commission said in a website presentation.
The panel aimed to sign a share price deal by June 24, after completing all steps in the transaction, it added. “The restructured PIA provides an opportunity to invest in a a full-service airline.”
PIA’s 23pc share of Pakistan’s aviation market is the biggest, and the airline could grow further to exceed historic levels of 30pc, the panel said.
With a fleet of 34 aircraft comprising 17 Airbus A320s, 12 Boeing B777s and 5 ATRs, the airline loses traffic to Middle Eastern carriers, who have a market share of 60pc, because of an absence of direct flights to destinations.
The carrier has air service pacts with 87 countries, and landing slots at key destinations such as London Heathrow.
Restructuring
The re-organisation of the business will separate the aviation-related aspects from non-core components, so freeing the operating subsidiary of a large portion of legacy debt.
The restructuring will move out 603 billion rupees ($2.2 billion) of liabilities, leaving 203 billion ($730 million) on the balance sheet for the acquired business.
The presentation added that PIA broke even at earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortisation, and restructuring or rent costs (EBITDAR) level in 2023, which the panel projected to continue in 2024.
Besides the losses and debt, however, global aviation regulators have questioned PIA’s governance and safety standards for some years.
In 2020, after a PIA plane crash in Karachi killed nearly 100, followed by a fake pilot license scandal, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) banned the airline from its most lucrative routes in Europe and Britain.
The ban continues, costing the airline annual revenue of nearly Rs40 billion.
“PIA plans to restore its network, starting routes into the United Kingdom, Western Europe and the United States,” read the investment presentation.
Privatisation and the IMF
The offer of the stake, which carries management control, follows the agreement to implement fiscal discipline plans with the IMF, from which it secured a $3-billion bailout in June.
The government is now looking to start talks with the lender for a medium-term programme key to shoring up an economy bedevilled by high inflation, low reserves of foreign exchange and high external financing needs.
The IMF wants reforms to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that more clearly define ownership and government roles.
Shares of the airline dropped 7.5pc in intraday trade to hit the lower limit, after soaring more than 403pc in the last six months.
A 12-year-old opened fire on Tuesday at a school outside the Finnish capital Helsinki injuring three other children, police said, adding that the attacker was in custody.
The school in Vantaa has around 800 pupils and 90 staff. Children in grades one to nine, or aged seven to 15, attend the school.
“There are people injured in the shooting incident”, police said shortly after 10am (7am GMT).
Police were alerted to the scene at 9:08am and later specified that the suspect and the injured were all 12 years old.
The city of Vantaa’s crisis group was activated following the shooting, local media reported. Images from the scene showed a large number of police at the school.
Police officers talk to family members of pupils at the Viertola comprehensive school in Vantaa, Finland on April 2. — Reuters
In an update around 11:30am, police said the suspect, who was carrying a gun at the time, had been arrested in an area of Helsinki in a “calm manner”. Parents of pupils attending the school told the media that the shooting had occurred in a classroom.
Police urged the public to stay away from the area and remain indoors. “Do not open the door to strangers,” they said in a statement.
Finnish Interior Minister Mari Rantanen said in a post on X that the day had started in a “shocking way”.
“I can only imagine the pain and worry that many families are experiencing at the moment,” she said.
Nine children were killed in a blast in southeastern Afghanistan caused by a landmine, laid during the country’s decades of conflict, a provincial official said on Monday.
The mine went off as a group of young boys and girls were playing with it in the Geru district of Ghazni province on Sunday, said the provincial head of the information and culture department, Hamidullah Nisar.
“An unexploded mine left over from the time of the Russian invasion went off when they were playing with it,” Nisar told AFP. “Unfortunately, it killed nine children.”
Ghazni police said the children — five girls and four boys — were aged from four to ten years old.
Swathes of Afghanistan are littered with unexploded mines, grenades and mortars from decades of conflict, spanning from the Soviet invasion in 1979, the civil war that followed, and the 20-year Taliban insurgency against foreign-backed governments.
Violence has reduced dramatically since the Taliban seized power in August 2021, ending their insurgency.
Unexploded ordnance and mines, however, still claim lives regularly, with the International Committee of the Red Cross saying children are the main victims.
Also on Sunday, another child died and five other people were wounded when unexploded ordnance went off in Herat province, local police said on social media platform X.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan conceded defeat on Sunday in the country’s local elections, saying the vote was a “turning point” for his party after two decades in power.
Partial results from across the nation of 85 million people showed major advances for the Republican People’s Party (CHP) at the expense of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Istanbul’s mayor, the opposition’s Ekrem Imamoglu, claimed re-election with nearly all ballot boxes opened, telling a euphoric crowd of supporters: “Tomorrow is a new spring day for our country.”
Final results are expected to be released on Monday (today) by the country’s electoral commission.
Erdogan, 70, had launched an all-out personal campaign to win back Istanbul, the economic powerhouse where he was once mayor. Rampant inflation and an economic crisis have, however, hit confidence in the ruling party.
Large crowds filled the square outside the opposition party’s Istanbul city headquarters waving Turkish flags and lighting torches to celebrate the result.
After casting his vote, Imamoglu emerged to applause and chants of “Everything will be fine”, the slogan he used when he first took the city hall from the AKP in 2019.
The 52-year-old is increasingly seen as the biggest rival to Erdogan’s AKP ahead of the next presidential election in 2028.
In Ankara, mayor Mansur Yavas — also of the CHP — claimed victory in front of large crowds of supporters, declaring “the elections are over, we will continue to serve Ankara”.
“Those who have been ignored have sent a clear message to those who rule this country,” he added.
Yavas led with 58.6 per cent of the vote to 33.5pc for his AKP opponent, with 46.4pc of ballot boxes opened.
Opposition supporters celebrated victory in Izmir, Turkiye’s third-largest city, as well as in the southern city of Antalya.
Some AKP stronghold towns were at risk of being lost, results indicated. “Voters have chosen to change the face of Turkiye,” said CHP chairman Ozgur Ozel as the results emerged.
“They want to open the door to a new political climate in our country.”
‘Respect the decision’
Erdogan acknowledged the electoral setback in a speech to supporters at the headquarters of his party.
“Unfortunately, we have not obtained the results that we wanted,” he told a subdued crowd.
“We will of course respect the decision of the nation. We will avoid being stubborn, acting against the national will and questioning the power of the nation,” he added.
Erdogan has been president since 2014 and won a new term in May last year.
He had called Istanbul the national “treasure” when launching his campaign to retake the city.
But while he dominated the campaign, his personal role did not help overcome the widespread concerns over the country’s economy.
“Everyone is worried about the day-to-day,” said 43-year-old Istanbul resident Guler Kaya as she voted.
“The crisis is swallowing up the middle class. We have had to change all our habits,” she said. “If Erdogan wins, it will get even worse”.
Although opposition parties had been fractured ahead of the poll, analysts predicted a stormy political future for the AKP and its allies.
Berk Esen, an academic at Sabanci University, said that the CHP had pulled off “the biggest election defeat of Erdogan’s career”.
“Despite an uneven playing field, government candidates have lost even in conservative strongholds. This is the CHP’s best results since the 1977 elections,” Esen said on his social media account.
Unrest in southeast
“Whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkiye,” Erman Bakirci, a pollster from Konda Research and Consultancy, recalled Erdogan once saying.
The election was held with the country reeling from an inflation rate of 67pc and having seen the lira currency slide from 19 to a dollar to 32 to a dollar in one year.
Clashes were reported in Turkiye’s Kurdish-majority southeast, leaving one dead and 12 wounded, a local official told AFP.
The pro-Kurdish DEM party said it had identified irregularities “in almost all the Kurdish provinces”, in particular through suspicious cases of proxy voting. Observers from France were refused access to a polling station in the region, according to the lawyers’ association MLSA.
About 61 million people were eligible to vote for mayors across Turkiye’s 81 provinces, as well as provincial council members and other local officials.
Last week, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb reported “very good progress” on privatising loss-making Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) and outsourcing three airports.
Meanwhile, the Privatisation Commission of Pakistan is reportedly busy devising a new three-phase strategy to privatise state-owned entities (SOEs), barring those considered of national or strategic importance.
The current privatisation list focuses on loss-making public enterprises and prioritises entities like PIA and power distribution companies to reduce the government’s involvement and haemorrhage of taxpayers’ money.
The massive annual losses of Rs500 billion incurred by the SOEs, which form a part of growing public expenditure, have become a major drag on the national budget, with their accumulated losses topping Rs2.5 trillion or nearly $9bn. Moreover, the financial burden of these resource-guzzlers, apart from haemorrhaging government budgets, has also become a source of systemic risk for the financial sector.
‘Haste can do more damage than good, with the risk of oscillating towards creating a private sector monopoly in lieu of a public sector’
The World Bank has pointed out in a report that the profitability of SOEs in Pakistan had been declining and turning into losses for about a decade. Things have come to a stage now where “the profitability of Pakistan’s federal SOEs is the lowest in the South Asian Region” as their aggregate profit at 0.8 per cent of GDP in 2014 turned into losses worth 0.4pc of GDP in 2020 and, growing, thus becoming a major driver of fiscal deficit and source of substantial fiscal risk.
But successive governments, despite being cash-strapped, have gladly bankrolled these SOEs with borrowed money. However, many believe that with little easy money available to continue financing their losses through borrowings, the government has no option but to eliminate them.
The current privatisation initiative, undertaken under the army-backed Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC), aims to sell shares of certain public assets to investors from friendly Gulf countries.
The authorities expect a massive investment of more than $50bn from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia alone over the next five years. So far, however, only a fraction of the investment has been made by investors from these two countries in Karachi Port and a private oil marketing company.
Privatisation of loss-making public entities and improvements in the governance of others are also major goals of the ongoing International Monetary Fund (IMF) rescue loan as part of structural reforms. They will also be major conditions of the next medium-term bailout Pakistan is seeking from the lender of last resort. According to reports, the IMF wants early privatisation of PIA, Pakistan Steel Mills, RLNG power plants, and electricity distribution companies.
According to Muslim Commercial Bank Limited chairman Mian Mohammad Mansha and former State Bank of Pakistan Governor Shahid Kardar, successive regimes have overstretched the mandate of the Pakistani state, burning huge holes in its budget.
“This has resulted in its inability to perform, efficiently and effectively, what should be its core functions — security of life and property of its citizenry, and provide justice and some basic social services, responsibilities that it must pay for and provide.
“This private behaviour is rational since these choices are being made based on service quality. But they resist privatisation because there would be reduced opportunities for ‘patronage’ [an appropriate all-embracing term in our context] or earnings as fees or junket trips as directors of these publicly owned entities,” they have argued in a joint op-ed for this paper.
Pakistan started privatisation of the state-owned enterprises in the late 1980s under the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) when the first Benazir Bhutto government offloaded 15pc shares of PIA through the stock exchange. The privatisation transactions have returned a gross value of Rs650bn (approximately $2.36bn) to the government during the last three decades.
In addition, it has saved recurring losses of billions of rupees per annum and brought in efficiency and profitability in several privatised SOEs, if not all of them.
The privatisation of banks, the telecom industry, and electronic media is often underlined as huge success stories that must encourage policymakers to disinvest the remaining SOEs to save taxpayers’ money, improve efficiency, create more market competition, and encourage greater private sector investment and participation in the economy.
However, people like former investment minister Haroon Sharif think the government must decide as to why it wants to privatise SOEs. “Before heading into privatisation, the government and SIFC should clearly state and communicate the reasons for their decision to choose this path.
“Do they want to get rid of loss-making entities because they can’t manage them? Or have they determined, in principle, that it is not the government’s job to run these businesses? There is a difference between the two,” Mr Sharif told Dawn.
“They must spell out a clear-cut policy. Otherwise, these transactions would not only not fetch the desired revenues but also risk ending up in litigation [as has happened in the past in many cases],” he concluded.
He is of the view that privatisation is only one tool to transfer management to private investors — it has produced mixed results in different countries. “There are other solutions as well to invite private participation in the management of SOEs without the typical sale of shares, whether it be concessions, franchise or management contract.
“The authorities must consult widely and involve professionals to make the process a success. The ultimate goal should be to stop the bleeding of public money.”
The World Bank has also raised concerns over Pakistan’s approach to privatising its SOEs. The bank has identified economic volatility, judicial activism and resistance from trade unions, litigation, fears of monopoly creations, weak political commitment, and perceptions of corruption cost post-2007 as key factors leading to unsuccessful privatisation efforts.
In its Public Expenditure Review 2023, the lender cautioned the government of looming litigation in divestments to foreign states under government-to-government contracts and instead advised public offerings through stock exchanges followed by privatisation under the transparent oversight of a special joint committee of the parliament.
“Such a move (under government-to-government contracts) could lead to litigation, raise questions about transparency and full disclosure and may slow down the privatisation process further.
“Judicial decisions in the Pakistan Steel Mills privatisation and Reko Diq mining contract cases badly hurt Pakistan’s image as an untrustworthy country where international contracts are not honoured, and businesses always run the risk of falling victim,” the Bank said.
It has also advised revamping the privatisation commission by staffing it “with able professionals who can prepare a financial model for each entity to be privatised” and ensuring that privatisation promotes efficiency and competition in the economy.
Zafar Masud, the president/CEO of the Bank of Punjab, believes that sustainable growth is impossible without a thriving private sector, for which the starting point is a Private-Public Partnership (PPP). He also cautions that privatisation — awarding concessions or ownership transfer— must be undertaken with extreme care.
“While it’s an absolute must, its pursuit in haste can do more damage than good, with the risk of oscillating towards creating a private sector monopoly in lieu of a public sector. Therefore, we need to do at least two things before we embark on privatisation. Firstly, regulators should be made independent and stronger, with the appointment of top professionals on merit and on market terms to protect people.
“Secondly, transaction structure and selection criteria of successful private parties shall be such that it would promote competition and have a broader view of long-term economic prosperity rather than myopic bottom-line approach. Investors with a private equity mindset, backgrounds, for example, shall be discouraged and prohibited,” he told this correspondent.
However, the authorities have decided to move ahead with their privatisation plans, and it is amply clear that progress will remain chaotic at best without extensive reforms and greater transparency.
Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, April 1st, 2024
