Officials shaping privatization of banks
"The government does not have a clear strategy" A group of Treasury and Finance Ministry officials are in talks with representatives of the nation's three remaining state-run banks to draw up their privatization plans, government officials said last week.
"After it's finished, (our recommendations) should be approved by the cabinet," said Urszula Mitroczuk, director of the Treasury Ministry's financial institutions department.
The group first met in December, two months after Treasury Minister Wiesław Kaczmarek said he would scrap the previous government's plans for an initial public offering (IPO) of 30% of Powszechna Kasa Oszczźdności Bank Polski (PKO BP), the nation's largest commercial bank. In addition to PKO BP, Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego (BGK) and Bank Gospodarki Żywnościowej (BGŻ) are also included in the talks, officials said.Both PKO BP and BGK are wholly owned by the Treasury Ministry, which also has a 65% stake in BGŻ.
Representatives of the three banks were tight-lipped about the government's intentions last week, and declined to reveal details of their discussions.
"These are matters for the treasury," said Leszek Zioło, spokesman for PKO BP.
The government press office said Ireneusz Robert Sitarski, undersecretary of state at the Treasury Ministry, Jacek Bartkiewicz, Finance Ministry undersecretary of state, and Przemysław Morysiak and Bogusław Grabikowski, directors for financial institutions in the Finance Ministry, are participants in the talks. None were available for comment at press time.
A Finance Ministry spokesman said Kaczmarek is not among the officials meeting on the banks' fate.The previous government's plan to float the 30% stake was criticized by many financial analysts, as any potential foreign investor would have no influence on the bank's direction. Bank watchers warn that the state-run financial institutions, particularly PKO BP, need strategic investors for injections of capital, which would allow them to modernize and compete in the European Union after Poland joins the single market around 2004.
Zioło said that PKO BP had already started trimming jobs, though he wouldn't disclose how many of the bank's 38,400 employees had been axed. The cuts are needed if PKO BP is to move forward with plans for a centralized IT system for the bank's 1,200 branches.But after nearly a year of flirting with the idea, plans seem no further along.
"The supervisory board hasn't decided on the issue," Zioło said.
"(The IT system) would certainly lower costs and improve communication between the various branches of the banks," said Dariusz Górski, an analyst at ING Securities.
Analysts are generally pessimistic about the government's behind-the-scenes retooling, particularly as it relates to PKO BP's situation.
"The government does not have a clear strategy," Górski said. "Nobody is going to buy a minority stake of any of the treasury-owned companies after (what happened to) Eureko and Powszechny Zakład Ubezpieczeń (PZU)," he added, referring to protracted struggle by the Dutch investor to up its stake in the Polish insurance giant.
Janusz Jankowiak, head economist at BRE Bank, suggested that the government was positioning itself to affect individual banks' policies. "There are indications it wants more influence on the retail banking market," he said.
