Collective appeals against law to privatise public enterprise

The collective “Save Public Enterprise” will lodge an appeal in respect of the law around the privatisation of public enterprise with a view to repealing this law. This emerged on Friday in a communiqué.

A petition requesting that the law of December 16th, 2015 be repealed has also been instigated. To date it has been signed by more than 1000 individuals.

These are, in particular, members of the company VEGA, the Leftist Movement political party, Christian and Socialist trade unions, MOC (Christian Workers Movement), Attac (Association for tax on financial transactions and active citizenship), and CADTM (the group for cancelling third world debt).

University lecturers have also signed it.

The reform introduced by the law puts an end to the legal obligation upon authorities to hold majority shareholdings in public companies such as Proximus and bpost. This opens the floodgates for privatisation.

This law must be resisted as “these companies, besides the services which they provide the public, also offer that which is apparently most important. This is allowing the distribution of bumper dividends to the state,” the collective maintains.

It goes further saying that “transferring shares or public activities towards the private sector does not respond to a legitimate public utility aim.” Besides the new law amounts to “outlawing parliamentary debate through the intervention of special powers granted to the Council of Ministers.”

The appeal will be lodged before Tuesday July 12th, with the Constitutional Court or within six months of publication of the law in the Moniteur belge (Belgian Official Gazette).

(Source: Belga)


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