"The 'timings' for this transition [to the private sphere] are issues that I do not master, but we play our role which is to monitor and guarantee that this process is done in the best way so that it does not further harm healthy competition in the market", said Eugénia Fontes Pereira, when questioned by Lusa.
The president of ARC explained that the seizure of companies by the State should not be understood as a monopoly or merger of companies, as it is a "temporary situation". "What we need to say when we look at these arrests is that this is a temporary situation, the State is not arresting to keep the companies, it is a transitory situation", she assured.
The head of the ARC added: "What is going to be done is to arrest, but what is intended in the end is what is being done in ProPriv [Privatization Program] is for the State to leave, it is never to be a businessman". "The State does not want to be in these sectors, in these markets with business participation, so what I can say here is this, it is a transitory situation", he reiterated, when speaking on the sidelines of the III Annual Conference of the ARC, which takes place in Luanda.
Several private media outlets, namely TVZimbo, Palanca TV, O País newspaper, Rádio Mais, Rádio Global, an audiovisual content producer and a printing company passed, two years ago, to the sphere of the State for “being constituted with public funds” .
The action is part of the process of recovering assets of the Angolan State within the scope of the program to combat corruption, one of the axes of governance of President João Lourenço.
Palanca TV has already been made official as the new sports channel of the Public Television of Angola (TPA).
Regarding the reprivatization of the bodies that passed to the State sphere, Manuel Homem, former Minister of Telecommunications, Information Technologies and Social Communication assured, in August 2020, that they would be privatized, stressing that "in time" the mechanisms of the TVZimbo privatization process.
TVZimbo and the other bodies, he added at the time, "are in a process, there is a management committee that is surveying everything that is necessary to facilitate this integration process".
The fate of media companies seized by the state is a matter of concern to journalists' unions, opposition parties and members of civil society.
The president of ARC also stressed that the body is part of the technical group of the National Commission for the Implementation of ProPriv, the Government's program for privatizing assets and/or state-owned companies, to "prevent the transfer of dominant positions".
"We are in a phase where the State is starting to leave the business sector, but we are ensuring that this exit is not a transfer to the same group or the same company, that is, there we guarantee that these sales and acquisitions do not have the same buyers ’ he noted.
ARC celebrates four years of existence and to mark the date, the III Annual Conference on Competition and Economic Regulation in Angola is held in the capital.
"In four years of activities we are still working on its implementation with many challenges, but also with some achievements, we already have a well-defined and structured regulatory framework for the performance of our mission", underlined Eugénia Fontes Pereira.
The transformation of the regulatory authority into an independent entity with administrative and financial autonomy is one of the challenges for ARC, she stressed.
