BAGHDAD: Iraq’s industry chief is battling a global crisis and a deep-rooted aversion to Western capitalism as he presses ahead with privatization to wrench the country free from past Soviet-style policies.
Fawzi Al-Hariri, minister of industry and minerals, says he has broken new ground by ushering in Iraq’s first public-private partnerships, and plans to introduce new import regulations to bolster Iraq’s own industries.
“It’s little in international terms but a leapfrog in Iraqi terms,” he said of the up to seven joint ventures he has fostered between private investors and state-owned enterprises.
“It is unheard of to have private sector involvement in the public sector. We broke that taboo,” he said in an interview with Reuters.
As well as trying to entice private investment into war ravaged industries, Iraq plans to introduce import tariffs of between two and 20 percent early next year, a move it hopes will encourage foreign manufacturers to open factories in Iraq.
Iraq has some 67 state-owned enterprises, which include 240 factories employing between 100 and 4,000 workers each. Yet equipment is ancient, and even before sanctions and the war that ousted Saddam Hussein in 2003, Iraq had long supported unproductive state industries to keep people employed.
Plans to privatize or partly privatize Iraqi industries have hit a wall of suspicion among Iraqi lawmakers and the public who for decades lived with Saddam’s socialist economic policies.
Privatization legislation is stuck in Parliament awaiting ratification, and Al-Hariri said he did not expect any state industry stake sales until at least 2012. Utilities such as water and electricity, and industries such as cigarette manufacturing are unlikely to privatized at all.
