Rotimi Amaechi, minister for
transportation, says the federal government was only negotiating and had not
signed a railway concession agreement with General Electric.
In an interview on the ‘Morning
Show’ of Arise TV Network, Amaechi said GE is no longer in the business of
transportation and had to hand over its interest in the deal to another firm.
“General Electric did not pull
out. No concession agreement has been signed, none. We have been negotiating,
there is no way you will get a concession agreement in one year.
“What happened is that most of
their business activities, they have dropped a lot of (them), I don’t know if
it includes energy, transportation and all that. When they found out that they
couldn’t continue in that line of business… because they were no longer in the
transportation business, the next company took over the lease, they didn’t pull
out, it has nothing to do with our economy, they were excited about this thing.
The minister said South Africa’s
Transnet SOC Limited will now take over from GE and a special purpose vehicle
(SPV) would be set up to allow Transnet and other firms to do the job.
“Now, the South African company
has continued, they want to do the rehabilitation, we are at the point of
setting up the SPV before we can sign the concession agreement.
“Have we finished negotiations?
The answer is yes; the problem we have is that they want another six months to
get their ministers in South Africa to give them approval to set up an SPV and
we can’t sign without that because there are four companies involved.
“The four companies will form an
SPV with which they will come to the table to sign. Each company, especially
the one in China, say they will need six months to be able to convince their
government to go into the concession. We are good to go, we are waiting for our
partners.”
Click to signup for FREE news updates, latest information and hottest gists everyday
Advertise on NigerianEye.com to reach thousands of our daily users
No comments
Post a Comment
Kindly drop a comment below.
(Comments are moderated. Clean comments will be approved immediately)
Advert Enquires - Reach out to us at NigerianEye@gmail.com