Deals
Wealth Fund Rid of `Pocket Change' Readies Flurry of Kazakh IPOs
- Samruk-Kazyna nearing sales of Kazakhstan’s ‘strategic assets’
- Air Astana, Kazatomprom may be first IPOs, Beisengaliyev says
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Unloading what Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth fund calls “pocket change” was the easy part. Next up is the biggest wave of privatization in the Central Asian country’s history.
Samruk-Kazyna, which gained assets accounting for about half of the nation’s economic output after bailing out banks hurt by a financial crisis in 2007-2009, has embarked on a “program of transformation,” according to Berik Beisengaliyev, the fund’s management board member. That’s meant streamlining organization to reduce the number of firms it controls by half to about 300 by the end of this year, he said in an interview in Almaty.