Let us keep it as much as possible above the board

Sir, years ago, when the Venezuelan state owned oil company PDVSA was a thousand fold more transparent about its activities than it is now under the Chavez regime, I still had to go to their official filings in the US, produced as their debt were publicly listed there, in order to get the best possible information. I must confess that ever since, I am totally biased for public listings. I needed to alert to that fact before commenting on the letter of Javier Echarri the Secretary General of the European Private Equity and Venture Capital Association and where based on their own compilation of research reports he categorically states that “Private equity is fully regulated and benefits the pension funds of millions of ordinary people” June 7.

It might very well be that Echarri is right, but since the reason for taking companies private sometimes sound so similar to why some big chunks of our economies in many countries go underground into informality, should we not at least mention that it surely reflects badly on our society as a whole if we make darkness more valuable than sunlight.

By the way, one thing confuses me with respect to all those investments by pension funds in private equity funds that Echarri mention. As I have understood it pension funds are frequently restricted to the use of investment graded instruments, and so in this case that would signify that private equity companies can be investment grade, for public purposes. Is that not something of an oxymoron? Or do the credit rating agencies have access to some internal information we don’t?