PPP projects did not notice the crisis – Newspaper Kommersant No. 167 (7368) of 09/12/2022

The market for public-private partnership (PPP) projects, as follows from the data of the National PPP Center, has not yet felt the impact of the expansion of sanctions. In January-August, 65 projects were closed commercially for the amount of 234 billion rubles. At the same time, although the number of projects turned out to be approximately at the level of the previous year, the total volume of investments almost doubled (a year earlier it was 120 billion rubles). The volume of private investment, however, remained at about the same level as last year – 139 billion rubles. against 134 billion rubles. in 2021

The peak of investments was in January, when investments in two projects that were commercially closed amounted to 90.5 billion rubles, which were decisive for ensuring an increase in the total volume. Also, the increase in the indicator is explained by the consolidation of the projects themselves – according to the PPP Center, more than half of all commercial closures this year fell on capital-intensive projects (35 initiatives worth 225 billion rubles).

As noted in the review, the stability of the market is largely associated with anti-crisis relief (the possibility of changing the essential terms of concession agreements without coordination with the antimonopoly service and revising the contract price due to the rise in the cost of building materials, as well as the possibility of non-competitive conclusion of agreements in a number of industries) and the implementation of measures from called “Infrastructure Menu”.

In total, 3.7 thousand infrastructure PPP projects are being implemented in Russia with a total investment of 5.4 trillion rubles, of which 3.9 trillion rubles are private. According to the PPP Center, in general, for 2022, “with the active implementation of measures to support and stimulate investments,” the number of projects that have passed commercial closure can reach 150, the volume of investments in them is 370 billion rubles. It should be noted that in this case, the results will turn out to be worse than last year, when more than 160 projects worth 516 billion rubles went through commercial closure, and even slightly lower than the pandemic 2020 figures, when it came to projects worth 390 billion rubles. In general, it follows from the review, there are prerequisites for building up the portfolio of projects: since the middle of the year, an increase in the number of launched initiatives has been recorded, and the pace of preparing new ones is increasing. Thus, in July, 36 competitive procedures were launched and 52 private initiatives were published for a total amount of 202.4 billion rubles, which was a record since the beginning of the year.

Evgenia Kryuchkova