 Okay. Sorry about the delay. We'll start again. I think just the first slide is just why our state-owned enterprise is important to to look at it when you are in the public sector and I think your presentation showed it very clearly. Very often state-owned enterprises may go by large part of the economy and therefore of course running them efficiently is important because that way around you can if you get your state-owned enterprise to be more efficient you can release resources for other part of the economy either labor or capital. Secondly state-owned enterprises are present in in network industries where they provide very important inputs for other sectors and other private sectors so if you manage to get your state-owned enterprises more efficient that would provide better and cheaper services for private sector and therefore also be able to support productivity gains in the private sector and then the third effect is that it's often a sizable assets for governments and of course if you have an asset you would like it to give it a return and for a government of course state-owned enterprises or to give a return which you can then use to support your public budget and whatever you want to use your money for. I will skip the last bit. That said I should say I come from a country where state-owned enterprises actually doesn't have a very large role compared to other countries and that's also why I decided to call this in an audit perspective and not just a Danish perspective because that would seem a bit sad as you can see in the table to the left you can see in Denmark we have personally ownership shares in 28 enterprises which 12 are wholly owned by the Danish state and sort of a rough estimation says that its value of those holdings are around three percent of GDP so it's quite tiny but looking to my Nordic colleagues in Finland, Norway and Sweden you can see they have far more state-owned enterprises and their value are sort of six times eight times bigger than the one we have in Denmark so when we meet in the group of colleagues from the Nordic countries I'm always a little brother and I'm happy to be allowed to actually participate in their meetings because I think it's too little to be bothered about. Just looking at it in the Nordic countries we have state-owned enterprises in the same sectors as you'll see elsewhere it's infrastructure other network industries, airlines, different kinds of transportation particularly in Norway, Sweden and Finland they also have state-owned enterprises in natural resource sectors financial sectors and then all countries have a number of special purpose vehicles which by which I mean companies that have established to do special things for the government sector and it's not really up for privatizations just one example is we have a company in Denmark that built big bridges over our different waters and it has never meant to be privatized but it's just a way of organizing things so that was sort of a very brief introduction to the state-owned sectors in the Nordic countries then let me turn a little bit to the reform process and I think the driving factors for the reform process we have been through in the Nordic countries which have run more or less in parallel started actually back in the 1980s where for several reasons people start to open market for competition in the EU it was the decision on the internal market in 86 and of course a lot of the then state-owned enterprises then had to face competition and had to work in real markets and of course that kind of provoked a lot of thoughts of then how are we actually going to deal with state-owned enterprises when we have open markets so I think that has been one driving factor and the other one was in the late 2000s came an increased focus globally on corporate governance of the private listed companies in terms of transparency what are they going to say shareholder's role in running listed companies and I think those two trends merge and in all four of the Nordic countries new ownership policies was defined in the late 2000s and it was then followed by OCD guidelines on corporate governance which was first published in 2005 and I should say I think more or less through the whole there is a working group in the OCD that did these guidelines and I think for most of the time of that working group it has been in person from the Nordic countries that have been chairmen so there is a lot of similarities in the OCD guidelines and the way we go about it in the Nordic countries so it's about ten years ago that policies were reformulated and I can see looking to my Nordic colleagues they have or just about to redefine or update their guidelines and the same is true for the OCD guidelines where a public consultation is actually undergoing right now. I don't expect that any of these will lead to big revolutions in the way we go about things so it's more a matter of refining things and of course we have learned something over the past ten years which we now have to try to implement in our guidelines. I think the starting point which become clearer and clearer and I think John's presentation support it is that although we kind of fell in love with the foreign law with the companies we work with we also recognize that the state is a weak owner for many reasons. Some including some of the newspapers claim that it's because the civil servants are not good at their jobs so that's the main thing so you should just hire better bureaucrats and then the state on enterprises would be very efficient and very well run. There might be something to that story but I also believe that there are some more institutionally based reason why it's very hard for governments to run companies in an efficient manner. I've just taken some of the reasons in here and I think the first reason is that ownership of commercial enterprises will never be the core of government. I think at least in the Nordic government is neither elected nor not re-elected because of what is happening in the state owned enterprises. There are so many other agendas so the state on enterprises never get the political focus and sort of the advantages you have if you have an owner which is very strongly focused on trying to run the business and getting things right. So that's one reason the second reason is that even though we can try to do a lot to try and say that state owned enterprises is separate from government there will always be a tendency that political pressures will arise and it can either be governments that try to take the phone and call the companies to do something which is not commercially sound because there might be a short-sighted political gain but it can also be the other way around and that is that some of the state owned enterprises are so big that they can actually influence policies not for the greater good but to further their own agenda and I think that is a very unfortunate mixture where things get muddy and you never get to the right solutions. So I think that's one reason why I think states will never become very good owners of commercial enterprises. And as I said the consequence of that is that we frequently see or my experience that our enterprises often get their own agenda that they follow so they know they have an owner but it's very unclear what the owner wants and therefore the company the management can tend to follow their own agenda and it can be that they won't grow rather than efficiency. I think that's what we typically see that I think it's fun to go out investing and the shareholder never expect a return so who cares so I might as well go out and take some chances and then that often leads to an effect where the risk return profile of the company get wrong that they take on too big risk without having considered sort of the downside of that. I think if I should just a single anecdote is that I went many years ago to a meeting with a CEO of one of our state enterprises and we said to him we would like to have some dividend from your company you're earning all this money so why can't we get something in dividend and his response was that if it should be in that way then he'll make sure we'll never get a dividend because he could just make the profit go away so that was his that if he couldn't keep the money to make you investments and then oh yeah it was again good so that was just why the state is a weak owner and of course from that it leads to the first question which I'll go into is sort of the optimal scope of state-owned enterprises and it follows if the state is weak then of course we ought to privatize and get rid of as many state-owned companies as we as we can or put it otherwise that if the state is to own enterprises there should be very strong reasons for that and that should go beyond sort of the pure commercial reasons just not just a matter that the state can get a return because if that was the objective of the state we could invest in all kinds of other companies so we could invest in US companies or in purely private companies we don't have to be a majority owner so there must be strong reasons why the state should own things I've just listed a few examples of that kind of rationale for state ownership I think natural resources might be a very good reason for state ownership in particular if you find it difficult to make a sort of appropriate tax system where you can get the resource and tax by by government then that might be a reason why you would like to have a state ownership instead then the classic natural monopolies of infrastructure again if you don't feel comfortable you can get a regulatory framework to avoid monopoly profits and that kind of stuff state ownership might be a substitute for that and I think in particular in some of the Nordic countries more geopolitical reasons play in that one of the big fears in Europe these days is that the Russian gas problem comes and take over our entire energy infrastructure so there are some concerns about that then I'll skip the third and just go to to the first one which I know it's it's a matter where Norwegian and Finnish colleagues are very concerned and that is if they're privatized and it's all in the open foreign hands then they might lose some headquarter functions well-paid job and stuff like that so they try to to to keep some stakes in in the listed companies I think normally in Scandinavian countries you'll need 10% of of a company then you can avoid that it's de-listed and being taken over so they want to keep the companies as independent entities so I think that's the first lesson from what I would say is that the state is a weak owner therefore you should only keep stable enterprises there are very good reasons for having that and that will of course as I shown in the previous phase mean that the state would actually own a number of companies at all points in time at least as far as I can see in the Nordic countries and then a lot of work has gone in the recent years tried to find the optimal or the best possible governance model we can have given that that we will have state-owned enterprises and I think the best it's not a perfect model I can assure you but I still think it's sort of the best model for governing state-owned enterprises running along the dots I put in here the first is that the state-owned enterprise should be run at arms lengths so be a clear division where the state is acting as a normal shareholder it's not necessarily clear what a normal shareholder is but in our line of thinking Denmark is kind of a big institutional investor having a significant position in the listed company so that's how we perceive ourselves but we don't want to get too close to the company but we don't want to be too far away so I think we have defined ourselves as sort of a pension fund or something like that having a 10-20% stake in a company and that's the way we should act as a shareholder and then at the other end of the arm we will have the company that should then be giving a lot of freedom to run the company in terms of making all operational decisions investment decisions and stuff like that and it also means in Denmark that in the Nordic countries that the board of directors are primarily filled with people who are not employed in the civil service so it's people that are external to the government so we try to create this arms links however as an owner we cannot just sit back I think the state audit criticized me last year for having slept for three years but I got my pay in a report I think it was a bit unfair but as course we need as shareholders of course to be actually following our state on enterprises and I think one thing we are struggling with in all of the three Nordic countries these days is to how can we better to define targets the scope for the board of directors and the companies and I think we all all of the Nordic countries work sort of with a free dimensional way of setting targets one thing is that it's very important that the state become aware why are we only this company is it just something we have for historical reasons or what is the purpose what is it that we would like to achieve or think the company should achieve that you know that of course leads into to the second objective which is I think as an owner we have a responsibility to discuss with the board of directors what should be the strategic direction of the company what should they be allowed should they be allowed to go abroad and invest which a lot of them would like to do at least in Denmark that's sort of the CEO stream is to make investments in other countries but why should on the other hand why should taxpayers be exposed to risk running businesses and purely commercial terms in other countries and then then there's a third level of target setting and which we're also working on is try to make some specific targets for each company but again at a pretty overall level where it's easy easy to observe whether the goals are achieved or not based on accounts so it's things like return on capital some efficiency target capital structure and that kind of stuff and I think I already taken the third so let me go to the fourth and then I think the fourth important thing which I think we have fairly progressed in the Nordic countries is that it's very important that there are transparent financial relationship between the state and the SOEs I think that's the way to run things for zero reason it's good for the state and for for the minister of finance that we can always see whatever obligations we might have through our state on enterprises through either explicit or implicit guarantees that kind of things and it's also of course important if you have markets which are open to competition where we have this whole discussion of creating a level playing field and the playing field is not level if state on companies have an implicit or explicit state guarantee that would give them advantages and and these things so I think these are sort of in very broad terms sort of the overall government's model that that we work with in for the past 10 20 years in the Nordic countries and we'll go on working with but we'll hopefully be able to refine it and be better to do our jobs so thank you very much