SÃO PAULO – The director of the National Land Transport Agency (ANTT), Carlos Nascimento, said that all railway concessionaires will be called upon by the government to negotiate an adaptation of the contracts in force to the new model of railways, open access. "We are going to build a modernization of the contracts, without disruption, but without the premise of extending the concession period", he said, after participating in a panel at the Intermodal South America event. According to him, the forecast is that negotiations will take place from the end of this year.
Nascimento stated that adapting contracts to the open access model will not necessarily result in companies needing to invest. “There are several ways to do contract rebalancing,” he said. Asked if the railway sector could go through a similar situation to the electric one, the director denied: “This is an ANTT action, not government policy as in the case of the electric sector.”
Regarding the expectation of launching the public notice for the first stretch of railroad approved by the Federal Court of Auditors (TCU), between Campinorte (GO) and Lucas do Rio Verde (MT), Nascimento said that the contract is almost completely ready, but still there are adjustments for the government to carry out together with the private sector. One of these points, according to market information, is the payment guarantee mechanism by the state-owned company Valec, which will absorb all the capacity of the railways to be tendered and transfer them to railway operators. The director said that the notice should be published in the first half of 2014.
Wladimir D'Andrade
Source: State Agency
