Works for almost S / 20,000 million complete another year without being unlocked

At least some US $ 5 billion (approximately S / 20 billion) in investments of a major caliber remain stuck due to links to corruption.

The stoppage of the Majes Siguas II irrigation project, which should allow the cultivation of high-value agro-export products such as avocados, grapes and artichokes (income for Arequipa for more than US $ 1,010 million annually), it is the most painful.

Four years in detention since the process was resumed, which in its first stage was partially executed by the State, so that the sole signing of Addendum 13, the last with the Spanish Cobra, came to a standstill on October 23, after the arrest of Governor Elmer Cáceres for the Los Hijos del Cóndor case. As a result, the regional councilors refused to sign the document that, previously, had passed filters in the Comptroller’s Office and relevant entities.

According to the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF), in its production stage Majes Siguas II It would contribute 13.9% of Arequipa’s GDP, and 0.7% of the national GDP, while, in terms of employment, in the construction phase it would bring 8,100 jobs, plus 145,000 formal jobs.

Cobra had proposed a $ 104 million increase in the budget to swap open channels for a pressurized network. It would be the second time that the budget has been increased since the contract was signed in 2010. In 2015, with Addendum 12 and the TUO of the contract, the State’s share rose from US $ 207 million to US $ 282 million. With this new idea, it was going to go from the US $ 404 million conceived as the goal of a Public Private Partnership (PPP) to around US $ 700 million.

Time is running out, and Cobra has given until this month to sign. Next year he doesn’t want anything anymore. From the government They ask to wait until January, while the councilors agree to stamp their signature on an expected irrigation project that, apparently, burns in the oven door.

The economist Alonso Segura recalls in this line his time at the MEF, when he proposed to unlock some 56 public and private investment projects, including Matarani. In this sense, it points to problems associated with not concentrating efforts on the planning and formulation stage, as well as the high turnover of ministers in key infrastructure sectors in recent governments.

“You can’t anticipate everything that’s going to come up, and when it does come up, you need the ability to solve the problems that are getting in the way. There is a lot of fear among officials to make a decision because whatever you do you will get a report. That was the philosophy we had with the PPP law, strengthening the first stages to have everything very well thought out, the relevance, objectives, all of that was for multi-year plans. The project is prevented from being ‘pharaonic’, approved as it is for the authority in power, “he said.

The Lord of Moche

The paralysis of the III stage of Chavimochic, in La Libertad, does not have to do, specifically, with findings of corruption of Odebrecht. The problem is that no one wants to sit down to negotiate with her after a pending arbitration that she has had since 2016 due to a financial closing that she did not present because they had not given her land. This transcendental irrigation project, whose potential and first two stages have been developed since the time of García, has a total investment of US $ 800 million and, to date, With 70% construction of Palo Redondo, a key dam for its start-up, US $ 220 million has been spent.

The concessionaire presented three party proposals: terminate the dam, desist from a possible arbitration in case the award does not agree with it, and its exit from the project. That is, he asks to finish the 30% that he lacks of Palo Redondo and pack his things. Otherwise, judgment against the Peruvian State and five more years to wait for Chavimochic. For the moment, the GORE hopes that Midagri will return the project to it to assume the risk of renovating it at its own expense, provided that the work does not get stuck any more. Meanwhile, the expected ruling could come out this month, at any time, making December a critical month for Peru’s two largest and most idle irrigation projects.

They were 150,000 new jobs when incorporating to the agricultural production of the north 30,000 hectares of earth that were prepared and ready to be cultivated; in addition to a promise of a private investment of between US $ 500 to 1,000 million.

Carlos Casas, dean of the Faculty of Economics and Finance of the UP, maintains that there is a lot of distrust and fear of any businessman to sign these public infrastructure works, since they are stained and nothing guarantees that they will not be affected by new uncovers later. Faced with this, it proposes a reorganization of companies, norms and transparency mechanisms for the execution of future works. For the specialist, Chavimochic III should go back to zero.

“People specializing in this type of works have come out and little progress is being made, because an eternal problem for these slogans is the physical and legal cleaning of land, something in which there has been no progress. The Metro, the airport took so long for this. We have problems from different sides ”, he indicates.

By the route of Lima

Last May, the MEF once again brought Odebrecht to the fore after issuing an “unfavorable opinion” on the project of the new addendum to the concession contract with Rutas de Lima, presented by the MML. In what should be the first addendum with the Brazilian after Car wash, the Lima council proposed an anti-corruption clause that “was far from the expected standard”, the ministry reported.

Gas pipeline of nothing

Just four days after the beginning of 2015, the first pipes of the South Peruvian Gas Pipeline, from India, arrived by ship to Callao. With an investment of US $ 14 million, they corresponded to 3% of the pipeline needed for the entire trunk, according to the then concessionaire made up of Odebrecht Latinvest and Enagás. A year later, the disclosure came to light and, after the Brazilian left the project in 2017 (they did not get the financial one either), the Government gave Osinergmin taking care of the tubes, for which it hired the Colombian company Estudios Técnicos, in June of that year. Also to the English Mott MacDonald to restore the credibility of the project to its detractors.

The problem is that the custody of these pipes, now inoperative, costs US $ 46,899,000 each year, and in four years more than US $ 200 million have already been disbursed, counting the additional transfers arranged by the MEF in recent months due to the rise in the dollar. Unlocking this massification project is essential, as it harms the development of the Integrated Gas Transportation System in the South Zone of the Country (Sitgas), which seeks to replace the gas pipeline. The price of these goods is calculated in the order of US $ 1 billion.

As if that were not enough, Pluspetrol has revealed that it returns 400 million cubic feet of Camisea gas a day because they have nowhere to put it. And it is not that it does not have anything for internal consumption, since it places 600 million in the network that, unfortunately, today only prioritizes the capital. The same figure goes for exports. The issue is urgent.

Juan Carlos Salinas placeholder image, Director of the Infrastructure Area of ​​the Muñiz Study, points out that the problems associated with unlocking investment projects must be addressed in a comprehensive way that allows isolating the technical guidelines and strengthening this at the level of guarantee mechanisms that allow supporting the eventual liability on the contractor , based on the rules previously installed in this course.

But that does not mean that political will should be set aside. In the case of those works that are paralyzed, there is also a cost associated with the maintenance of the asset and the uncertainty that is generated around it. That, in the long run, generates a cost to the State, added to the millionaire profits that the same project could have generated in terms of reactivation at this time. It is unprecedented that they continue to be paralyzed for so long and that, until now, these issues have not been approached from a technical perspective that allows the continuity of works ”, he affirms.

There are thousands of paralyzed works

Last October, the comptroller general, Nelson Shack, reported that 2,445 contract works were identified that are paralyzed and only 66 are in full execution of the works.

“For these paralyzed works, a whole orderly procedure was established for their reactivation, which began with the mapping carried out by regional and local governments, to then establish the list of priority works to reactivate within the framework of Emergency Decree No. 008- 2019 and the modality to follow to solve the problem ”, he explained.

He mentioned that, if the necessary measures are adopted to reactivate this universe of identified paralyzed works, such as approving some regulations or a budget for their reactivation, the problem could be solved within six months.

Corruption cuts across governments

By Karla Gaviño, professor at the School of Public Management of the Universidad del Pacífico.

Many works already have a correlation of years with different presidential speeches. Corruption processes are transversal to all of them, it is an important challenge to face this underlying problem that accompanies us with different processes, sizes and types of public investment, from the smallest to the largest. Corruption continues to be an evil that we have a hard time eradicating. The comptroller said that in 2020 there was a loss of S / 22,000 million due to corruption and that, in 2019, about S / 23,000 million, But that reduction was solely due to the issue of the pandemic, not because we had achieved the ability to fight this. There is an important space in matters of regulation and management, because a lot has to do with expanding the capacities of the Comptroller’s Office and of the entities themselves to make better requirements and transparent selection processes, and especially in the contractual phase, since many of the large works that are announced already have addenda in progress, but that have been shelved by cases such as Lava Jato or Construction Club. For example, in Chavimochic, the last three presidents have thought about the solution many times, whether or not to sit down with Odebrecht so that they can finish the remaining part and leave. On the other hand, there is also the idea of ​​doing it by more traditional public investment, all subject to arbitration. The same happens in Majes, only the signing of Addendum 13 was missing, but now it is stopped because the new members of the Arequipa council must be aware of what they are going to approve, and it is understandable.

This project has been included in all the multi-year macroeconomic frameworks of all these governments as an important issue to reactivate the economy, but nothing.

Reactions

Alonso Segura, former Minister of Economy

“As important as unlocking a project is identifying the problems at the beginning. The longer it takes for the work to come out, the more difficult it is to get it going again. The costs begin to vary ”.

Carlos Casas, Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Finance of the UP

“There are many mechanisms for citizen participation to avoid this type of problem during the execution of a project, but people do not seem to care too much. It is vital to get more involved ”.