reprivatization

Reprivatization refers to the process of restoring properties seized or otherwise nationalized from privately held owners by a government to privately held status. This may include returning seized property or compensating uncompensated former owners, or reprivatizing state held enterprises to new owners, especially banks, which were privately founded but came under state control due to economic crisis or other factors. The latter scenario is sometimes referred to as privatization, though scholars have specifically referred to the sale of nationalized Mexican and Korean banks to private shareholders as reprivatization. The terms reprivatization and privatization are sometimes used to describe similar processes. The term privatization is more often used to describe the transfer of property under long-term government control to private owners, while reprivatization implies the property being returned to privately held status came under government control on a circumstantial basis. Both terms have been used in connection with larger privatization schemes in the former Soviet Bloc, particularly the process of assigning new property rights.

Reprivatization to private owners has been sought by any number of parties whose property has been nationalized, including the traditional nobility in certain areas of Europe, Holocaust survivors, their descendants, and other survivors of persons who died in Nazi death camps and whose property was confiscated by the Nazis or by later Communist states and disposed of in various ways; and by corporations.