Free Republic

The proposed sale by Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch, of his estim-ated $10bn (£5.5bn) stake in the Sibneft oil company to Gazprom, the state-controlled gas group, looks like a neat way of settling accounts with his country. He sails off into the sunset, free to buy yachts and football clubs, while the Kremlin virtually completes the renationalisation of Russia's core energy assets. Smiles all around, not least among the bankers involved. The truth is far less pleasant, for Russia and for Mr Abramovich. This deal, if it goes ahead, will be the latest development in the untransparent privatisation of Russia's...

TransPennine Express to be brought under government control due to 'continuous cancellations' Recent data showed that TransPennine Express had cancelled one in six services during March. The blame for the disruption has been laid at the feet of drivers, a backlog of training and the need to reform working practices.

The United States Postal Service (USPS) management just ran into a possible game-changing obstacle to its shameful pursuit of a fully privatized post office: labor solidarity. Here’s the background. For a decade the USPS has been aggressively shrinking, consolidating, and outsourcing the nation’s postal system. In July 2011 management upped the ante by announcing the rapid closure of 3600 local post offices, a step toward the eventual closing of as many as 15,000, half of all post offices in the nation.

Serbia to roll out €30bn sell-off By Stefan Wagstyl and Neil MacDonald in Belgrade Published: February 21 2008 19:03 | Last updated: February 21 2008 19:03 Acting in the teeth of the Kosovo crisis, the Serbian government is rolling out eastern Europe’s biggest privatisation programme. The planned sale of companies is worth an estimated €30bn ($44bn, £23bn), which will include the mass distribution of free shares to about 4m people. With privatisation mostly complete in other ex-communist states, the programme is certain to attract interest from international bankers and institutional investors. The plan could prove controversial for ethnic Serbs because...

THE United Nations has drawn up plans to privatise the bulk of its staff at its New York headquarters or have their work done more cheaply overseas. The move is in response to mounting demands for reform from the United States, its biggest paymaster. The Business has learned that Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, has commissioned a study into the outsourcing of the department for General Assembly and Conference ­Management, the main UN ­decision-making body whose officials issue about 200 documents a day in six languages. The move comes as the UN grapples with the oil-for-food scandal in which...

id they believe they would be welcomed as liberators? Administration plans to privatize Social Security have clearly run into unexpected opposition. Even Republicans are balking; Representative Bill Thomas says that the initial Bush plan will soon be a "dead horse." That may be overstating it, but for privatizers the worst is yet to come. If people are rightly skeptical about claims that Social Security faces an imminent crisis, just wait until they start looking closely at the supposed solution.President Bush is like a financial adviser who tells you that at the rate you're going, you won't be able to afford...

Lights go out across France in privatisation dispute Jon Henley in Paris Wednesday June 16, 2004 The Guardian (UK) Six French cities were plunged into darkness and several leading government figures had their power supply cut yesterday when the trade union CGT led a national day of action against plans to partly privatise the state electricity utility, EDF. Both Nicolas Sarkozy, the finance minister and the communist-linked CGT, supported by three other unions, said they would not back down as parliament debated the privatisation bill and more than 6,000 power workers took to the streets in Paris alone. Bernard Thibault,...

n advance of Tuesday's reports by the Social Security and Medicare trustees, some credulous journalists wrote stories based on tips from advocates of Social Security privatization, who claimed that the report would offer a radically downgraded vision of the system's future. False alarm: projections for Social Security are about the same as last year. Projections for Medicare, however, have worsened: last year the trustees predicted that the hospital insurance trust fund would last until 2026, and now they've moved it back to 2019.How should we react to this news?It has become standard practice among privatizers to talk as if there...

Aboard the gravy train The main argument for privatising the railways was that stale old bureaucratic monopoly would be whipped into life by a fresh blast of capitalist competition. A good example was in Essex and East Anglia where the British Rail monopoly was replaced by several railway companies. The frantic buying and selling that led to the new franchises shoved grotesque fortunes into the pockets of a few bureaucrats, but none of the new companies worked very well, and the rail service didn't get much better. To solve the growing problems, the thrusting entrepreneurs who run the strategic...

<p>The state says it may have to close five airports, including the busy facility at Kapalua on Maui, unless it can turn them over to private operators.</p> <p>An Oct. 1 letter from Gov. Ben Cayetano to legislators says the state is considering closing or privatizing the five small airfields — Dillingham on O'ahu, Port Allen on Kaua'i, 'Upolu and Waimea-Kohala on the Big Island, and Kapalua on Maui — in an effort to cut costs.</p>