HANOI, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- As many as 173 out of 234 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that have been required to transfer their state ownership to the State Capital Investment Corporation (SCIC) have failed to do so, according to a report released by Vietnam's Central Institute for Economic Management (CIEM).
The target of transferring 234 SOEs that have ownership of ministries and provincial People's Committees was set in 2014, in order to restructure them by the first quarter of 2017 to improve the efficiency of state asset management and the investment environment, and increase fairness among different type of business ownerships.
The state capital in the 173 enterprises is estimated around 82.6 trillion Vietnamese dong (3.6 billion U.S. dollars), the local Vietnam News online newspaper reported on Wednesday.
By December 2016, the SCIC took over the state ownership from over 1,000 enterprises with a total book value of 9.9 trillion Vietnamese dong (360 million U.S. dollars), and market value of 15 trillion Vietnamese dong (600 million U.S. dollars), accounting for 1 percent of state enterprise capital.
Experts said the stagnation of the transfer could be attributed to local committees and ministries, which wanted to keep the management of profit-earning enterprises but letting go of the loss-making ones.
Some SOEs demanded "special mechanisms" so that the state ownership could be kept, said the experts, adding that drastic measures have to be taken to hasten the transfer process.
