Treasury to swallow CCMAU

Thursday 3rd September 2009

The Treasury is to resume responsibility for monitoring the performance of state-owned enterprises with an announcement today that the Crown Company Monitoring Advisory Unit will be disbanded.

The move follows a growing sense among Government Ministers and key advisers that CCMAU has done too little, too slowly to improve the lacklustre performance of many of the government's commercial assets.

SOE Minister Simon Power has been reviewing the SOEs' performance since early in the year, has instituted new benchmark indicator reporting for SOE's on the CCMAU website, and there has been open criticism from senior economic Ministers about many SOEs' return on capital.

CCMAU's demise appears not unlike that of the Electricity Commission, whose likely replacement with new electricity market oversight arrangements has been spurred in part by perceptions that it had moved too slowly on its core issues.

The move was part of a wider announcement this afternoon by Treasury Secretary John Whitehead of a management structure shake-up which will axe nine existing senior positions and create eight new ones. Detail on the exact changes was not immediately available.

Whitehead said the changes were "not about downsizing the organisation but ...about the Treasury meeting the challenges of the new economic and financial environment that it is now operating in" and follows a leadership structure review.

Businesswire.co.nz

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