SOEs pay over GH₵194m dividend to government in 2023

Profit making State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in the country paid more than GH₵194 million to government last year as dividend. 

This is mainly from firms with government minority shareholding across the country.

In the 2023 State Ownership Report by the State Interest and Governance Authority (SIGA), Minority Interest State Companies paid GH₵139,691,792 which comprises 71. 89 percent of the total payout.

SOEs with full government ownership paid GH₵6,200,000 making 3.19 percent as other Joint Venture Companies paid GH₵48, 191, 515 indicating 24.83 percent.

Meanwhile, SOE sector recorded a profit before tax of GH₵4.6 million from the loss of GH₵9.6 million in 2022.

This is an improvement of about 80 percent from the 2022 financial results.

According to the State Ownership Report by SIGA, the performance of the SOEs have contributed about 27 percent of the country’s domestic growth, an increase of more than 50 percent from the previous performance.

Presenting the performances to the media on each sector, Project Lead Eric Bonsu Agyabeng said the banking and financial sector recorded huge losses due to the implementation of the domestic debt exchange programme.

“Despite recording losses in some of the state entities, government received more than GH₵194 million as dividend from minority shareholding firms. We see this as an impressive performance by the companies in the report” he said.

According to the Director General of SIGA, John Boadu, most of the losses are within reasonable cause as some provides social services to support the economy.

“We realized that not all of them are established with a commercial purpose. Some are to provide services so not much profit is required from them. For instance a company like ECG, Ghana Water. They are expected to provide water to homes and rural communities without any intention of making a profit so such cases are reasonable but we shall keep our monitoring role to ensure that the losses are within budget and controllable”, he noted.

Speaking at the media engagement, Minister for Public Enterprises Joseph Cudjoe applauded the report and charged the SIGA to do more since the exercise aimed at accountability in the public sector.

About 147 entities across the country were covered in this year’s state of ownership report, recording the highest number of coverage since the inception of the report.