Manila Bulletin, 17 December 2014
 
Nearly P700 billion worth of public-private partnership (PPP) projects will be presented to Investment Coordination Committee (ICC) this week as part of the next wave of big-ticket PPP programs that will be bid out to the private sector next year.

Tomorrow, the ICC, which is a cluster of government agency officials including the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) Director-General, the Secretaries of finance, agriculture, trade and industry, budget and management, and the Governor of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, will have to gather for a customary meeting.

The ICC evaluates the fiscal, monetary and balance of payments implications of the country’s major national projects and recommends to the President the timetable of their implementation on a regular basis.

“For this Friday, we are hoping to bring at least eight PPP projects to the ICC meeting,” PPP Center executive director Cosette Canilao told reporters on the sidelines of the ASEAN PPP Networking Forum held in Manila.

Canilao said these projects include the P19.3-billion Motor-Vehicle Inspection System.

“The DOTC [Department of Transport and Communication] has looked at another way of extending the terms for this project probably to make it viable to the private sector at the same time acceptable to the market,” Canilao said.

“So it’s a new parameter that has been open up and we have to present this to the cabinet committee before going back to the NEDA board,” she added.

The other projects that will be up for ICC review are the North-South Commuter Rail (P177 billion); the Metro System Transit Loop (P374.5 billion); the rebidding of the Cavite-Laguna Expressway (P35.4 billion); the unsolicited proposal for the North Luzon Expressway – South Luzon Expressway connector paramaters (P25.6 billion); and the unsolicited proposal on the Philippine statistical analysis computer system or the Phase II of the Civil Registry System-IT Project (P1.2 billion).

The projects that were mentioned have a combined project cost of P633.2 billion, while there are still some additional projects that the PPP center is going to make a report on.

“We’re also finishing the [project on the] further extension of LRT [Light Rail Transit] line 1 and we’ve already started the re-development and operation maintenance of the NAIA [Ninoy Aquino International Airport],” Canilao said.

In the website of PPP, it was specified that the project cost for these projects are still ‘TBD’ or to be discussed. (MBM)