"And now, rather than money going to private sector shareholders, those savings and efficiencies can come back down into the city council".
I have made it my job over the last five months to listen: to listen to staff, to customers, to regulators, to Government, and to our private sector shareholders.
There have been reports that management would like to bring in an adviser who would look to recruit a private sector shareholder, with the hope that a new investor would reduce government interference.
For the same reasons it also needs to be differentiated from privatization, which involves permanent transfer of control through transfer of ownership right or an arrangement in which the pubic sector shareholder has waived its right to subscribe.
They are "government-sponsored", a vague status that allows them to maximise profits for their private-sector shareholders.
"There's been a significant uptick in interest from utilities and other power-sector shareholders to deploy these solutions for their different needs," Omar Saadeh, a senior analyst at GTM Research, said by phone from San Francisco.
The two large private-sector shareholders that have served as proxies for Berlin and Paris are expected to substantially reduce their stakes "either immediately or in the near future," EADS said, in part through a general buyback of up to 15 percent of the company's shares that is planned for the first quarter of next year.
As a result, after Mr. Yeltsin appointed Mr. Chubais chief executive of U.E.S. in 1998, private-sector shareholders agreed to amend company bylaws to make it hard to oust him, thereby protecting him from the whims of the government, which owns 53percentt of the utility.
"The idea is to prevent private-sector shareholders from replacing state shareholders as abusers of the system," Harner says.
This was a privatisation overseen by a former finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who is one of two rivals to Ségolène Royal in the contest next week for the Socialist candidacy in the 2007 French presidential election.The deal was supposed to provide Airbus with a long-term French private-sector shareholder.
In the private sector, when shareholders incur losses, it is up to them to complain – but almost invariably they don't, as institutional investors account for most holdings.
