A portion of the capital of state-owned Angola Telecom will be sold on the country’s stock exchange, and the company is currently being valued ahead of the stock float, the chairman of the Capital Markets Commission (CMC) said at the CMC’s 6th Annual Meeting.

Mário Gavião told Angolan news agency Angop that one of the advantages of privatisation through the stock exchange is to provide a wide dispersion of capital and access to a large number of investors, which will allow higher follow-up on the success and expansion of the target company and the gains from the process.

Gavião also said that the stock market float is the best way to establish the stock price of the divested company, allows it to improve its credit rating and its position on the business environment list, bolstered by gains in transparency.

The participants of the 6th Annual Meeting of the Board of Directors, among other things, analysed the process of privatising public companies through the Angola Debt and Securities Exchange, in line with the provisions of the Government’s Interim Plan and the Macroeconomic Stabilisation Programme (PEM).

Daily newspaper Jornal de Angola reported that the government intends to start a privatisation programme with the sale of portions of capital in stock exchange operations, quoting a spokesman as saying “there is a political will to move forward with the capital market.”

The privatisation of public companies that are not profitable and are a “dead weight for the State” was considered to be one of the priorities of governance by the President of the Republic, João Lourenço.

In 2018 more than 30 public companies are due to be privatised in 2018, based on a decision made back in 2013 and later revealed to Bloomberg by the Minister of Economy from 2010 to 2017, Abraão Gourgel. (macauhub)