Biris: We don't have any PPP project at the moment because there was no bankable one

Biris: We don’t have any PPP project at the moment because there was no bankable one

Newsroom 07/07/2016 | 17:34

In Romania there’s no public-private partnership (PPP) at the moment, but not because of the lack of legislation, but because no such initiative was accepted by banks, said Gabriel Biris, state secretary of the Public Finance Ministry on Thursday, according to Agerpres.

“We don’t need a holding law to have functional holdings in Romania. The same as in the public-private partnerships. From the legislation interpretation regarding the public acquisitions and from the civil code, we can make any kind of contract we want and the law allows. We, as lawyers, have participated to transactions of hundreds of millions which sold including the social parts of the firms that didn’t exist and owned buildings that weren’t made. And they could have been made, “ said Biris.

He added that the PPP projects failed the bank financing test.

“We didn’t have until now PPPs, but this was due to the fact that we don’t have legislation. At some point there was signed this kind of PPP, that was to be implemented, but in the end it was not, because it failed the banking test, “ said Biris.

He underlined the fact that without an economic base, no PPP will be finished. “Following the American principle ‘money talks, bullshit walks’, I think we should look better at the economic base. The bank acceptability is realized through the insurance of a revenue from that partnership, which is either obtained through exploitation, or completed with public sources, “ he added.