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Can French PPP move beyond the big three sponsors?
11 April 2011
French PPP is likely to have its busiest year yet, on the back of big-ticket government accommodation and transport deals. But there’s still no sign of an end to the market dominance of the big three French sponsors. Robert Smith reports.
France came to the PPP game late. It wasn’t until Jacques Chirac’s election as president in 2002 that PPP was considered as a viable alternative to state funding. While other jurisdictions tended to settle on a modified version of the UK’s PFI model, France drafted its own PPP framework and brought the 1981 Dailly law in line with the new procurement strategy. As one French PPP banker puts it: “The Anglo-Saxon model travelled all around the world but failed to make it across the channel.” London infrastructure bankers, when not trying to parse the latest utterances from the UK’s coalition government, tend to cast envious glances at the French market.
Although it took nearly a decade longer than Britain for the market to get going, France’s rejection of the British model became a source of strength following the global financial crisis. Britain’s urge to assemble ever more finely-tuned risk transfer...
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