Tiếng Việt
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As committed in BOT contracts to 59 projects, the fees will be increased 12% to 18% every three years. However, under the Government’s directive of Announcements 107 and 321, the ministry has yet to raise the fees.
Under the roadmap, as many as 37 BOT projects will have to enact the fee hike at the end of 2019, including two projects which should have revised up fees in 2018, whereas 10 projects will introduce higher fees in 2020 and two projects in 2021. The remaining projects will have to make upward fee adjustments after 2021.
Some investors have proposed the Ministry of Transport begin the fee hikes as per the BOT contracts which were signed previously, according to the ministry.
Vietnam has seen 27 BOT projects increase revenues, while revenues from 26 others were lower than expected in their financial plans among the 57 BOT projects under the management of the Directorate for Roads of Vietnam, Thanh Nien newspaper reported, citing a report from the directorate .
The ministry noted that if prompt solutions are not found, declines in revenue among BOT projects might disrupt their financial plans.
In addition, loans for investments in BOT projects will become bad debt as a result of the failure of their financial plans, affecting the scheme calling for traffic infrastructure investment under the public-private partnership format.
The falling revenues faced by these projects were attributed to the fact that localities’ socio-economic growth plans failed to match their estimates, resulting in the number of vehicles passing through tollgates to drop, and to the large amount of monthly and quarterly ticket users, leading to a revenue drop of 15%-20%.
The ministry also said that the shrinking number of vehicles passing through BOT tollgates resulted from the localities’ investments in roads running in parallel with the BOT roads.
The ministry proposed two solutions to the Government for this problem. The first solution is to adjust BOT fees up, in line with the roadmap, during the 2019-2021 period.
To avoid objections by road users when fees are hiked at 10 tollgates at the same time, the ministry intends to negotiate with investors and banks to only raise fees at BOT projects reporting lower-than-planned revenues in 2019.
The second solution, which the Ministry of Transport proposed, is executing the plan to have fees at 49 BOT projects revised up in 2022, instead of in the 2018-2021 period, which is expected to cause the financial plans of nine BOT projects to be broken up, pushing these investors towards the risk of becoming bankrupt.
Due to the negative consequences, the Government will have to spend VND3 trillion supporting these nine projects.
As such, the ministry said that the first solution is more practical and, under this solution, the Government will not need to use the State budget to rescue the BOT projects.
Earlier on May 7, the Government Office said that the prime minister had asked the Ministry of Transport to review and promptly handle the fall in revenue at BOT projects as reported by the local media.