A leading expert on business rescue and liquidation says business rescue is an ideal option to extricate some state-owned entities from their financial quagmire.According to business rescue expert Alex Eliott, a partner at global law firm Hogan Lovells, the government should take a back seat and let the SOEs be managed properly as companies.
“There is a need to turn these SOEs around without any political interference. It is common knowledge that they are in a very bad financial situation. Some are not delivering services and are costing the taxpayer a lot of money. I think that some of the smaller state-owned companies can benefit and the country can benefit tremendously from business rescue,” Eliott said.
In the case of the SOEs, Eliott said it was possible to rescue them, especially if there was no political interference as that caused a lot of problems. “If the government is the shareholder of a company, there is this tension and it is basically political,” he said.