Archive · 2007 · From the print edition of Wednesday 8 August 2007, Vol. 15, No. 4,509
BusinessThe ministries got the work and the departments got the money
Executive directive 2007/09 leaves the ISEZ with ten ministries and two new departments. The ministries keep the paperwork. The departments take the state's companies.
TALAS — The ISEZ will keep the ministries created by the Democratic Republic, but not the companies that came with them. Executive directive 2007/09, signed on Monday and published in the Department of Public Information's bulletin yesterday, merges the DRI's Ministries of Communications and of Public Works into a Department of Infrastructure and Communications and creates a Department of Energy to take over the assets of the territorial power authority.
The two departments will be headed by directors appointed by the Governor and answerable only to his office, as the departments of the territorial administration were. They will hold the state's shares in the telephone company, the power stations and grid, the roads authority and the railway. The ten remaining ministries, from Health to Agriculture, keep their names, their ministers and their buildings.
Officials described the arrangement as a return to order after the auctions of the winter, when the DRI sold state assets through ministries that, the directive says, "lacked the means to supervise them". Bankers in Talas read it differently. "The ministries got the work and the departments got the money," said one, who asked not to be named. "If you want a contract, you will know which door to knock on."
Older readers may also notice the words. Decree No. 2 of the DRI turned every department into a ministry in December. Since Monday, two of them are departments again.