Treasury seeks advisers for asset sales

NZPA

Wednesday 25th May 2011

Treasury is seeking advisers for work on government asset sales before to the November 26 general election.

Treasury has issued the first of three requests for proposals today. It seeks a commercial adviser, or advisers, to assist it in preliminary work.

The Government has said Treasury will do preliminary work on extending the mixed ownership model to state-owned Genesis, Meridian, Mighty River Power and Solid Energy and will consider reducing its stake in Air New Zealand. Under the model the Government will retain majority control of the assets.

The requests for proposals are being made by the Commercial Transactions Group, which is part of Treasury's Crown Ownership Monitoring Unit.

The second request will be for independent advice about selected aspects of the preliminary work, and is expected to be issued in the first half of June. The third will seek firms to do scoping studies of each of the four state-owned energy companies.

The Government wants to raise between $5 billion and $7 billion over three to five years by extending its mixed ownership model.

"As we promised, we are now clearly setting out our policy to New Zealanders well before the election in November," Finance Minister Bill English said on budget day.

The Government owned more than $220 billion of assets at the end of last financial year.

It will own more than 51 percent of each company and it has said that new Zealand investors will be at the front of the queue for shareholdings. Initial public offering are the preferring method of sale.

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