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Economists Say PPPs May Sink Slovakia Further Into Debt
Tuesday 16 March 2010 Zoom in | Print page
Bratislava, March 16 (TASR) - The financial burden brought on by public-private partnership (PPP) projects may seriously affect Slovakia's long-term indebtedness, economists from the Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAV) have warned in their Slovakia 2030 prognostication.
They say this may be a result of the fact that contracts closed via PPP normally span longer periods.
"There's one particularly big risk - how the repaying of PPPs will develop in the future. Scholars have different view on this than the Government has ... at any rate, we're afraid that these projects may affect the public debt situation," said Peter Stanek of SAV's Institute of Economy.
Spokesman of the Transport Ministry Stanislav Jurikovic told TASR in response that the most important thing is to achieve the most advantageous financing that's at hand. He also noted that to date it's still unknown how much the PPPs will actually consume.
At the moment, Slovakia plans to run three PPP projects, all of them concerning building motorways and highways.
An individual PPP project involves a private company (consortium) using its own resources to build it, and the state pays it off in pre-arranged instalments for 30 years after the road is built.
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