The Cabinet of Ministers has approved the procedure for calculating availability charges for roads built on concession terms, the press service of the Ministry of Infrastructure has announced.
"The adoption of this document will allow transition to practical implementation of concession projects for construction of automobile roads in Ukraine, including projects based on this model. This procedure protects the rights of investors, provides guarantees to them, and allows Ukraine to implement large-scale projects for construction of roads of European level jointly with them under the terms of public-private partnership,” Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Vilkul is quoted as saying.
The Interfax Ukraine news agency reports that the document, the text of which was published on the website of the Cabinet of Ministers on Friday, stipulates that the availability charge for a road will consist of the sum of the cost of its construction and the cost of its operation. The charge will be calculated for one month of operation a road, from the date of commissioning of the road until the end of the concession agreement.
The cost of construction of an automobile road includes the cost of construction, reconstruction, and/or overhaul of the road in accordance with the design documentation approved in accordance with the established procedures and the provisions of the concession agreement.
The operating cost of a road will consist of the cost of current minor repairs and operational maintenance of the road in accordance with the standards and regulations for maintenance of public roads, as well as in accordance with the provisions of the concession agreement.
The length of the road that is being commissioned and the price index for construction work on different types of buildings and structures, among other things, are also taken into account when calculating this charge.
As reported, seven projects for construction of concession roads have so far been identified: the Krakovets-Lvov-Brody-Rovno highway, the Shcherbakovka border crossing-Kharkov-Novomoskovsk highway, the first and second phases of the main ring road around Kiev, the Odessa-Monash highway, the Ulyanovka-Nikolayev-Kherson-Krasnoperekopsk-Simferopol highway, the Zaporozhe-Melitopol-Dzhankoy-Simferopol highway, and the Dnepropetrovsk-Reshetilovka highway.
The draft of the first concession tender is expected to be prepared before the end of this year.
