Sale of state’s TeliaSonera stake still blurred

Swedish Financial Markets Minister Mats Odell announced this week that the government is not ready to launch its planned sale of state assets, which includes shares in the country’s dominant telecoms operator TeliaSonera, airline company SAS, bank Nordea and stock exchange operator OMX. ‘We are in the phase of preparing how to do these sales,’ Mr Odell told Dow Jones on Tuesday, adding that ‘it is not fixed yet how the procedure or the structure will be.’ The new centre-right administration gained power in September and has said it intends to offload SEK150 billion (USD21 billion) in state holdings over the next three years, but has so far offered scant information on when it plans to sell. Odell stressed that the government is currently in the process of preparing for the transfer from daily management of the companies to their full privatisation. ‘There’s no timetable, and no ranking list of these companies. This is what we are going to decide’, he said.