DoF: PPP projects must be delivered quickly

Dominguez said he would like to learn from the ideas and practices of Tianjin on how to deal with the two conditions that the Duterte administration has set for its PPPP projects.

DoF headquarters: Finance Secretary Dominguez said that in the past, the time between the submission of a PPP proposal to the start of the project implementation took around 33 months on average.

Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said projects undertaken together by the public and the private sectors should avoid unwarranted delays and spare taxpayers the heavy burden of contingent liabilities supposed to be shouldered by the government. This is to ensure that these ventures turn out to be “Public-Private Partnerships for the People (PPPP).”

Dominguez informed prospective foreign investors at a recent international forum that while the Duterte administration welcomes Public-Private Partnership (PPP) projects to help finance its big-ticket infrastructure projects, these should fulfill the two conditions he cited so the ventures would truly benefit Filipinos.

“We have taken the attitude that the PPP is insufficient, it should not be Public-Private Partnership. It should be PPPP — Public Private Partnership for the People — that the infrastructure projects must be delivered quickly and we cannot take too much time negotiating with the private sector on this,” Dominguez said during an open forum on national and regional cooperation at the International Finance Forum (IFC) held recently in Guangzhou, China.

He added: “The second issue that we have seen on our PPP again — I don’t know if it’s true with other countries — not enough attention in the past has been paid to the contingent liabilities on the government that these PPP contracts involve in, and because of that we have taken a very serious position that we will limit severely the contingent liabilities on the government, and really the taxpayers, with regards to PPP projects.”

Dominguez’s statements were in response to Mr. Ding Huamei, the chairman and president of Tianjin Financial Assets Exchange, who suggested during the open forum that the PPP mode be explored by China and the member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in cooperating on the implementation of infrastructure projects in the region.

Tianjin Financial Assets Exchange is China’s first national assets trading platform for PPP projects.

The PPP was a priority program of the former Aquino administration.

Dominguez said he would like to learn from the ideas and practices of Tianjin on how to deal with the two conditions that the Duterte administration has set for its PPPP projects.

He recalled that in the past, the time between the submission of a PPP proposal to the start of the project implementation took around 33 months on average, while one project with competing private sector proponents took 60 months.

From an initial list of 75 flagship projects, the Duterte administration’s “Build, Build, Build” infrastructure modernization program now involves 100 projects.

The 100 flagship projects cover five categories, with Transport and Mobility as the top priority, according to a statement released earlier by Presidential Adviser on Flagship Programs and Projects Vivencio Dizon. The other four are Power, Water, Information and Communications Technology and Urban Development and Renewal.