Via Megha Merani in agbi.com: “Four or five years ago the region began focusing more on PPPs, announcing pipelines of projects,” says Sami Neffati, managing partner of Investcorp Infrastructure Partners, part of Bahrain’s Investcorp (part-owned by Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund Mubadala). But when you look at the delivery, “you would have seen delays, process [challenges] and cancellations.” The region is still “teething”, Neffati says, and learning about the discipline of PPPs. While most countries have PPP offices, often housed within finance ministries, Neffati says the authorities, who own the assets, still struggle to delegate project management and “intervene too much”. “They feel they need to control the process, but they don’t know how,” he says. “Very often, that leads to a failed or delayed process.” Progress is being made, Neffati says, but “delivery needs to accelerate”.
