TURKEY - Abdullatif Sener.

The Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs, Sener is trying to speed up the privatisation process. He cites Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister, as his inspiration for vowing to complete overdue privatisation which previous governments had stalled so frequently as to lose credibility. Soon after the AKP came to power, its government in early 2003 unveiled an ambitious programme to sell dozens of state-owned enterprises ranging from Tupras, the quasi-monopolistic oil refiner, to Tekel, the alcohol and drinks monopoly.

Sener has been working closely with Turgut Bozkurt, head of the Privatisation Administration (PA). On April 1, 2003, The Financial Times quoted Bozkurt as explaining Sener's objective as follows: "The basic goal is to transform the economy from a state-led economy to a market-driven liberal economy. Transferring state-owned companies to the able hands of private entrepreneurs will help rationalise the Turkish economy".

The US investment bank Morgan Stanley in 2003 said in a report describing public-sector restructuring as an "essential ingredient" to Turkey's reform process. Among other things, the report said: "The authorities need to abolish the kleptocratic state structure with bloated bureaucracies and over-staffed enterprises that contribute to corruption and economic efficiency".

Lacking experience in great power politics, the AKP government in March 2003 failed to help the US use Turkish territory to open a northern front in its war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. As a result it lost the chance of a $6 bn US war compensation package. (US support fell through after parliament dragged its feet in reconsidering a failed parliamentary motion allowing the deployment in southern Turkey of US troops bound for northern Iraq). At the same time, the AKP government was under renewed pressure to show it was serious about privatisation to improve a debt-ridden economy.

With a Thatcherite reformist zeal and encouraged by Premier Erdogan who is eager to see Turkey joining the EU as soon as possible, Sener authorised Bozkurt to focus more on speeding up the sale of state firms than on money the PA should receive. Explaining this, Bozkurt was quoted by the FT as saying: "We are not here to think like a bank".

Sener worked out a formula to overcome the problem of unemployment resulting from the privatisation process. Workers at privatised enterprises who are not offered jobs by new owners and have not yet reached retirement age can become civil servants, who typically earn much less than workers at state-owned companies. But the percentage of the 64,000 workers employed by the state enterprises in question and likely to take up the option of government service is not high enough to worry the state's treasury. The disincentive to choosing this option was to forgo up to $20,000 in severance payments and to transform public sector pension rights into less attractive terms applicable to civil servants. Sener has said: "We will do our best to avoid mistakes but we will not stop just because we hear loud voices against privatisation" (see background in Vol. 62, DT No. 19).