São Paulo government should announce up to the end of this month a program of concessions at the area of transport, through bidding procedures to be performed, mainly, for roads, regional airports and passengers’ collective transport. “The announcement should be done on the coming weeks, the public consultations may be opened this year and the bidding procedures might be performed in 2016”, said Giovanni Pengue Filho, director of Regulatory Agency of Delegated Public Services of São Paulo State Transport (Artesp), which has participated on the seminar “Concessions, Regulation and Judicial Safety”, held yesterday by Valor Econômico.
About 30% of the State highway network – 6.6 thousand km – has already been conceded. The remaining extension – 15.4 thousand km – should be offered to the private sector through concession or public-private partnership (PPP). The government also studies the transference to the private initiative of Jundiaí, Bragança Paulista, Campo dos Amarais (Campinas), Ubatuba and Itanhaém airports. Guarujá terminal may also be included in that list.
The concessions model is also under study for inter-municipal bus routes which do not attend the metropolitan area of the State capital, São Paulo. They would be lines between São Paulo and cities such as Ribeirão Preto, Bauru, Presidente Prudente.
The roads bidding procedure is also part of the federal government plans. On the coming months, 15 allotments of highways should be auctioned. According to Mauricio Muniz, secretary of the Program for Growth Acceleration (PAC), the government is working on the softening on demands in order to increase the interest for the bidding procedures. The demand of duplicating relevant part of the sections within five years is one of those points, says Muniz, who also participated on the Valor Econômico seminar.
“It is forecasted that the section to be duplicated is smaller than the required on 2013 auctions”, he said. The government also studies a demand for presentation of a net equity in order to participate on the auction. Among the innovations, it is also intended to include, on the public notices, a term of 120 days so requests of concessions economic-financial rebalance are analyzed by the competent agencies. “Currently, there is no term and there are complaints regarding the time of the process”, says Muniz.
The secretary also said that the projects are going to be further adapted to each highway reality. “The mandatory construction works shall be added to those which are going to be triggered by a mechanism named trigger, which is activated when an important demand is detected and indicates that there is necessity of intervention in any section.”
In the opinion of the experts participating on the seminar, the low financial return and regulatory uncertainty are the two major challenges that the Brazilian government needs to overcome so it can turn feasible the second phase of the Plan for Investment in Logistics (PIL 2), announced in June, planning to stimulate investments at the order of BRL 198.4 billion in highways, railways, airports and ports.
Economic adviser Raul Velloso says the policy adopted by the government on the past years which privilege the search for lower fees to the user without taking into consideration the projects economic reasonableness has been the major obstacle on the progress of concessions of logistics infrastructure. “The mistake is the government wanting to establish the investment return, fee which should be established by the market before the competition on the concession auctions.”
Lawyer Pedro Dutra, who performs consulting works for infrastructure investors, says the country has a wide portfolio of projects and there is availability of capital in the world for that type of investment. But according to him, investors opt for taking their resources to other countries. “No one is going to invest in infrastructure in Brazil, take risks and have a return for his/her investment lower than the return the Brazilian government pays for Treasury bonds “, he says.
According to Rafael Valim, president of the Brazilian Institute of Legal Infrastructure Studies, the concessions regulation in the country is “schizophrenic” and scares the investors. “We adopt regulatory models but do not take them seriously”, he says. José Elaeres Marques Teixeira, coordinator of the 3rd Camera for Coordination and Revision of Attorney’s General Office, says Brazilian Regulatory Agencies have been weakened on the last years and need to go through several corrections. “That is the only way to improve the regulation of infrastructure and attract private investors to the sector.”
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