Areas controlled by the Syrian regime have witnessed the liquidation of 50 companies in the last three months. This is equivalent to 75% of the total number of companies that have dissolved themselves since the beginning of 2022, which amounted to 79 companies, according to the director of companies at the Ministry of Internal Trade and Consumer Protection of the regime, Zain Safi.
Experts said the reason for this was likely the Syrian regime’s repellent economic policies, especially the focus on tax collection.
Hassan Hazouri, a lecturer at the Faculty of Economics at Aleppo University, believes that the regime’s policies have transformed the Syrian economy from a productive economy to a service economy. It did that by encouraging sectors such as tourism and trade, at the expense of real production sectors such as agriculture and industry, according to the pro-regime Al-Watan, on Sunday.
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Hazouri accused the regime of adopting policies that prefer to collect money first at the expense of sponsoring production and following procedures contrary to obvious economic laws, which led to the abject failure to control inflation and exchange rates. This negatively affected production and the standard of life of the citizen, all of which led to the loss of such a significant number of companies in a short period.
Hazouri criticized the regime’s decisions that give one exchange company exclusive rights in the market, as well as decrees criminalizing foreign exchange dealings, the policy of drying up liquidity, restricting the movement of money transfers between governorates, restricting the movement of daily withdrawals from banks, as well as policies that complicate the import process and raise its costs.
He pointed out that most of the businessmen emerging from the market work in industry and agriculture, and those who were prompted by the regime’s ill-considered decisions to close their companies temporarily or permanently. If they continue to leave them operating, it is at their minimum production capacity.
Last September, the regime’s Tishreen newspaper reported that about 2,000 new businesses in Syria were threatened with revoking their licenses for reasons related to the failure to complete the founding procedures.
This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
