After the government offensive, the motorway concessionaires claim to be in good standing

The North and West access concessionaires have come out to answer the Government, which intends to cancel the operating contracts of these two motorways. Both Autopistas del Sol and Grupo Concesionario del Oeste believe they are there rule “by signing the overall agreement (in 2018) having complied with all the control requirements provided for by the applicable legislation.”

The executive power published a decree on Thursday to initiate legal actions aimed at declaring the extensions of the concessions, signed in 2018, null and void.

Both concessions are in the hands of the same company: the Spaniards Abertis. And the communications they sent to the stock exchange are identical.

Autopistas del Sol (Panamericana) and Grupo Concesionario del Oeste (Autopistas del Oeste) declared that they were aware of the “decree which declared the decree establishing the renegotiation of the contract to be ‘harmful to the general interest’ and instructed Vialidad to action of lesividad in order to obtain the judicial declaration of nullity of the same “.

Companies have said it so far they have not been notified of any legal actionbut that the renegotiation agreement concluded during the previous administration “is fully legitimate”.

The companies assure that the agreement was approved by the Executive “after a” 16-year “renegotiation process, which began in 2002 with a partial agreement in 2006 and completed in 2018.

In previous communications to the Stock Exchange, the two companies had already warned that they were against the mandate of the General Prosecutor of the Treasury and National Roads, which was reviewing the agreement signed in 2018.

A cornerstone of the disagreements is a previous debt acknowledgment, for breach of the concession contract between 2002 and 2015. The executive power understands that Mauricio Macri’s administration validated an “alleged debt” from the nation state of $ 540 million with Autopistas del Sol and 272 million dollars with Grupo Concesionario del Oeste.

Abertis, the Spanish group majority shareholder of both companies, had filed a complaint with ICSID, an international arbitration tribunal of the World Bank. The company required a compensation of up to $ 1,135 million at that time.

As part of the renegotiation of the previous management, Vialidad extended the concession from 2020 to 2030, the deadline for Autopistas del Sol to recover investments already made and not amortized. The company, in turn, has pledged to disburse $ 7.3 billion in new works.

“Of all the documentation that motivated the signing and subsequent approval of the Full Contractual Renegotiation Agreements, there are no elements that give certainty about the existence of this presumed debt”, affirms the current Executive Power.

“The renegotiation was presented as urgent due to an alleged international complaint from the ICSID dealers. They claimed it was the remedy to avoid greater damage. It was a formal argument to advance in an obscure and arbitrary process that generated and continues to generate property damage for all Argentines, “according to Gabriel Katopodis, Minister of Public Works.