We share John Kay´s miseries

Sir what John Kay describes in “Public projects obscured by private finances” February 16, is very much what happened in many developing countries when we were subjected to the privatization crusade of our utilities and infrastructure.

Instead of the good project engineers, we were told we would get to run the operations efficiently, we were assaulted by financial engineers searching for how to squeeze out the most of what de-facto were most often safe monopolies, and that should ordinary have been financed at very low rates by orphans and widows. And, the cleverer these wizards structured the projects, the more they could pay upfront for the rights of executing them, and so the happier were our authorities too.

And now we are stuck with it, having to find consolation reading John Kay and seeing that at least our miseries are shared. The saddest part though is that it has so unnecessarily given the private sector a bad name. Looking at how doomed-to-fail these projects often were structured makes one suspect that it could almost have been done so on purpose.