Secondary Privatization in Poland (Part II): Evolution of Ownership Structure and Performance in National Investment Funds and their Portfolio Companies

This volume contains the output of country research undertaken in Poland in 2000-2001 by Barbara Blaszczyk, Michal Gorzynski, Tytus Kaminski and Bartlomiej Paczoski under the international comparative project "Secondary Privatization: the Evolution of Ownership Structures of Privatized Enterprises". The project was supported by the European Union's Phare ACE Programme 1997 (project P97-8201 R) and was coordinated by Barbara Blaszczyk of the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE) in Warsaw, Poland. The support of the ACE Programme made it possible to organize the cooperation of an international group of scholars (from the Czech Republic, France, Poland, Slovenia and the U.K.). The entire project was devoted to the investigation of secondary ownership changes in enterprises privatized in special privatization schemes (i.e., mass privatization schemes and MEBOs) in three Central European countries - the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia. Through a combination of different research methods, such as secondary analysis of previous research, analysis of legal and other regulatory instruments, original field research, statistical data base research and econometric analysis of individual enterprise data, the project aimed to investigate the scope, pace and trends in secondary ownership changes, the factors and barriers affecting them and the degree of ownership concentration resulting from them. The authors of this report look at ownership changes in the companies owned by the Polish National Investment Funds in the 1995-2000 period. They analyze the numbers of companies in the NIFs' portfolios were sold to what types of investors (i.e., domestic corporate, domestic individual, employee, foreign, other NIFs, public trading) in which years. A great deal of attention is also paid to the issue of changes in the ownership of the funds themselves as well as the issues of corporate governance in the funds (management costs, strategies, etc.) Finally, the economic performance of NIF portfolio companies is compared with other groups of companies in Polish economy, and then the group of NIF companies is broken down with respect to type of owner that acquired (or kept) them, and these groups are compared with each other. We hope that the results of this research will be of great interest for everyone interested in the little-researched question of what has happened to companies after privatization in transition countries.