Johannesburg - The South African National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) had almost depleted its available cash and investors were reluctant to provide it with more funding, it claimed yesterday.
“We’re not able to fund ourselves any further due to investors not feeling comfortable with our risk profile,” Vusi Mona, Sanral’s general manager of communications, said yesterday in an e-mailed response to questions posed by Bloomberg.
Mona said Sanral still needed President Jacob Zuma to sign the relevant bill into law to enable Sanral to go ahead with the improvement project, adding that the lack of funding was also affecting maintenance on existing toll roads.
Bloomberg said Sanral had borrowed R20 billion to fund the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP) and had debt, including interest, of R65bn. Bonds of R1.48bn would reach maturity at the end of October.
In May last year the government said it had guaranteed 56 percent of Sanral’s R37.9bn principal debt at the time and was also liable for unguaranteed debt of R14.1bn.
Bloomberg reported that the National Treasury said it had not been approached for further financial assistance for Sanral, adding “such assistance would be hard, if not impossible, given the difficult economic environment we’re in”.
Wayne Duvenage, the chairman of the Opposition to Urban Tolling Alliance, said Sanral had nobody to blame but itself for its low credit rating and inability to raise further debt.
He said this was because e-tolling had been rejected outright by the general public and Sanral had not tried to resolve the situation but had adopted an arrogant attitude that “it could do anything it liked”.
Duvenage stressed that Sanral was a state-owned entity whose function was too important to allow it to fail and said he trusted reports of its financial difficulties were not a red herring to try to garner society’s sympathy and support for e-tolling.
He questioned the reason for the further delay in the implementation of e-tolling, adding that Sanral had announced on April 10 that e-tolling would commence within a period of two months.
Duvenage said that apart from a six-month period when e-tolling was interdicted, between April 29 and mid-September last year, Sanral had been free to launch its plan and had proclaimed in the Constitutional Court in August that it would start e-tolling within weeks of the interdict being set aside.
Duvenage said that if the government had applied a 10c increase to the fuel levy in 2006 to fund the GFIP, when the project was “hatched”, more than R17bn would have been raised to date.
This amount would have included the R5.7bn allocated by the Treasury in February last year, which would have covered the capital costs of the freeway.
As a result, Sanral had wasted time trying to implement a grossly flawed plan to toll Gauteng freeways and had lost an opportunity to reduce this debt.
Duvenage said the alliance believed any consideration to force the implementation of e-tolling would be met by resistance on the highways, low levels of compliance, higher costs and “at the ballot box next year”.
He said reports that Sanral’s financial difficulties were affecting its ability to maintain existing toll routes were worrying and raised questions about its transparency and what was happening to the money it had raised on these routes. - Business Report