Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Ontario Government to use profit sharing income trusts to sell assets?


Today, Rob Snow host of CFRA's afternoon show was interviewing CTV reporter Paul Bliss who covers Queen’s Park

They were talking about Ontario selling assets and Paul Bliss said the Ontario Government is probably interested in selling some of the utilities in a form of an income trust type structure. He said this is what his sources are telling him.

Comment appears at about the two thirds point of the above mp3 tape.

See: http://www.cfra.com/chum_audio/Ae-Paul.Bliss.Jan26.10.mp3

I have blogged several times about the loss of income trusts as being the loss of one of the best sale mechanisms for selling assets like LCBO and OLG and Hydro One, since profit sharing income trusts aligns with the investment objectives of the largest cross section of the Ontario populace, and hence diminishes the public back lash from the sale of a monopoly type asset to some preferred back room buyer, like when OMERs bought Teranet from public investors who were faced with a looming 31.5% tax, whereas the public pension funds back room deal saw to it that pension funds could own income trusts privately and not pay the 31.5% tax, whereas the public individual investor can not. Profit sharing income trusts also maximize the value received from the asset in question by the government, which is the fiduciary obligation that the government has when it sells a crown asset from the public to the private sector.

2 comments:

Dr Mike said...

I wonder where they got that idea.

Doing , as the light bulb comes on.

Maybe they are listening after all.

Dr Mike

PS--listen-up federal Liberals as Uncle Dalton might just be saying trusts are the way to go.

PSS---Is Uncle Dalton now ready to admit that trusts were not the problem as he had thought , but just may be the solution??

Anonymous said...

Okay dalton , Steve , Jim , jack ,
the mouse is out of the bag, implement the Mashall Savings Plan and we are on our road to fixing our pension system , clean up our deficits , and most important a job recovery for Canada.