Sri Lanka is planning a holding company for state enterprises in the style of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings along with a law for SOE with the hope of improving governance and cutting fiscal risks, officials said.
Sri Lanka has about 80 SOEs which can move completely out of state hands and another about 20 which for various reasons can be kept in state hands.
However, SOEs are subject to the ‘agency-principal’ problem where the actual shareholders (tax payers) are not represented on the board.
