Guillermo Ferraro, consultant and expert in infrastructure projects, was appointed Minister of Infrastructure by Javier Milei, a position in which he lasted just three months. Yesterday he reappeared to warn of the weak points of the project to privatize the strategic Belgrano Cargas.
In a long poster on the network
1-“since the dissolution of the Ministry of Infrastructure, the issue of transportation policy and in particular the fate of railway operations has lacked strategic orientation
2-propose schemes to the private sector where it is not known exactly how the transportation of people, cargo by waterway, integration with regional trade, and other parameters that can outline “the business plan” of whoever is summoned are integrated. invest at risk for long capital recovery periods invested, makes us think with distrust in the fulfillment of the commitments assumed at the time of the transfer of the operation
3-more than a year before winning the presidential election, the technical teams of the LLA, together with Javier Milei, have worked with specific professionals in each sector, to plan the central idea of who today is the President of the Nation, which is transfer the investment and design efforts of the proposed solution to the private sector through the private initiative system (“Chilean style”) and that resulted in the first legislative initiative of the Executive Branch (the so-called “base law”) incorporating, with the impetus of the Ministry’s teams, substantial modifications to the concessions law (#17520), incorporating modern statutes based on successful examples and correcting factors specific to the Argentine experience, allow operations that are currently in the hands of the public sector to be transferred to the private sector, minimizing risks, providing greater legal certainty, greater transparency in the concession process, and increasing expectations of amounts of greater investment, according to the modernization needs in each sector subject to privatization
4-the details of the announcement about the Belgrano Cargas that are known put into It warns to repeat a totally disintegrated approach to strategic transport policy: the fragmentation of operations in the operational chain (maintenance of roads, rolling stock, commercial operation itself, etc.), although it has as a correlation the possibility of attracting interested parties who qualify with lower investment requirements and experience in the business railway itself, also reduces the expected objective for the improvement of the railway sector and adds uncertainty about the viability of the business, in all or some of the fragments, making the process as a whole vulnerable.
5- the idea of Open Access, already proposed in other administrations since the 90s, inspiring this change of approach, has had several drawbacks in implementation. Although it is a model that has essentially worked in Europe, the context in terms of branch extension, concession terms and commercial expertise of the operators is very different from that of our country.
6- Lastly, this topic requires a in-depth study on the characteristics and restrictions of railway operation(there are sections with sufficient profitable load, there are others that even in private hands are not viable or must be subsidized) the repayment of the concession must be matched to the return capacity, which is totally different in each case. In short, our idea of effectively incorporating the private sector from the design of the operation to its financing, would make it possible to make the economic-financial balance of the contracts sustainable over time, and not relapse into the failures of the past, where each contract has ended in a conflict with the State, and in the re-nationalization of the assets involved”.