LIMA, May 1 (Xinhua) -- Bolivian President Evo Morales announced Thursday that the government will nationalize the National Telecommunications Company (Entel) and take over four foreign-owned energy firms, reports from La Paz said.

    The Bolivian government would take "absolute control from this moment on" of Entel, in which the Italian multinational Telecom Italia owns a 50 percent share, Morales told a huge crowd in a May Day speech.

    "Today we are nationalizing Entel, and starting today Entel returns to the hands of the Bolivian people," he said.

    Entel, a former state telephone company, was privatized in 1996when free market-oriented president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada was in office.

    Besides Entel, Morales announced the return to the state control of four former branches of Bolivia's state energy company YPFB, which was also privatized during the 1990s.

    "Basic services -- (we) call them energy, water or communications -- cannot be in the hands of private business. They're public services," he said. "Bolivia wants partners, not owners."

    Police were sent to stand guard outside Entel offices in La Pazand the eastern city of Santa Cruz following the announcement, which came just two years after Morales launched his nationalization of the South American country's energy industry.

    The president said he has signed an agreement to purchase a majority share in Spanish oil company Repsol's Andina, one of Bolivia's largest energy firms.

    Calling Repsol as the "symbol of a business that negotiates," he decreed the state takeover of the gas production company Chaco, controlled by British Petroleum, the pipeline company Transredes, controlled by the Houston-based Ashmore Energy International, and the German-Peruvian owned distribution company CLHB.

    According to Morales, the government will have majority shares in Chaco and Transredes and expropriate 100 percent of CLHB.