Juan-Miguel Villar Mir takes part in the III Brazil-European Union Forum

Juan-Miguel Villar Mir took part in the III Brazil – European Union Forum Reasons for a Strategic Relationship that took place in Rio de Janeiro, organised by the Euroamerican Foundation.

The President of the OHL Group spoke at the round table titled Energy and Transport Infrastructures, Necessary for Growth, together with Ramon Hernan, General Manager of North America and Brazil for Repsol YPF; Luis Felli, Vice President of Agro-Industrial Operations for ETH Bioenergia; Guilherme Lencastre, President of Geracao of ENdesa Brazil; and Octavio de Carvalho, General Manager of Nexans Brazil.

Juan-Miguel Villar Mir firstly spoke about Brazil’s current position. “The practice of democracy, strictness in administration, legal discipline and the application of distributive social policies together with a great wealth of natural resources have made Brazil into a great country, as is shown by their obtaining in 2008 of the Investment Grade”.

Along economic lines he highlighted that, according Goldman Sachs estimations, “BRIC markets, acronym of Brazil, Russia, India and China, will produce 44 % of the world’s GDP in 2050”. And also that on that date “forecasts place Brazil as the world’s fourth economic power, behind China, the United States and India”. He also stressed that “The investment made in the region by companies, a lot of them Spanish, has been and continues to be fundamental. Specifically, according to the Brazil Central Bank, in the 2007 – 2009 period Spain was the third largest investor and the second largest from the European Union in Brazil, investing over 7,000 million euros.”

Focusing on transport infrastructures he pointed out that “they directly and indirectly influence all areas of the economic and social lives of any country” and he clarified that “the infrastructures policy must be considered a state policy and have continuity, in order to benefit the citizens under any government”. He continued, underlining that “in order to maintain investor interest in the infrastructures necessary for any economy, it unavoidably requires complementing the limited range of public resources with private ones and, as a result, involve private companies.

Juan-Miguel Villar Mir indicated that “Latin America is the world leader both in the number of projects and in public-private investments in transport infrastructures (airports, railways, roads and ports)”, and that Brazil “is a pioneer in this field, in which it began its first projects in the mid nineties”. The OHL Group in Brazil

The President of the Group stated that OHL has worked in Brazil for 12 years. He said that OHL Brazil, a subsidiary of OHL Concessions, operates in the scope of infrastructure concessions and is listed on the Sao Paulo Novo Mercado stock market (Bovespa).

They manage nine motorway concessionaires “with a total length of operational motorways of 3,226 km, making us the biggest player in the Brazil market according to the number of concessioned kilometers of toll motorways with a total of 22 %, and committed to a total investment of around 6,000 million euros”.