Via the AFR:
Transurban will pay $9.26 billion for WestConnex after the NSW government confirmed the tollroad company and its partners had won a 51 per cent stake in Australia’s biggest tollroad.
The size of the price paid by the tollroad group is well ahead of expectations, with most analysts expecting the Transurban consortium to only pay around $5 billion for WestConnex. The transaction is costing the consortium $100 million.
The successful bid, which still requires approval from the Foreign Investment Review Board, comes after the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said on Thursday it did not believe an acquisition of WestConnex by Transurban would hurt competition for future tollroad sales.
NSW is cock-a-hoop:
In order to bid for the project, the ACCC made Transurban accept several court-enforceable undertakings.
It will need to publish some traffic data from its toll roads that will assist other companies to compete for future projects.
NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet said WestConnex would be “congestion busting”.
“This project means people will be able to travel from the west and south west of Sydney with ease, spend less time in traffic, and get home to their families faster,” he said.
As they are taxed privately for every driven meter, with tolls to rise by 4% per year for the next 43 years and a bunch of previously free public roads also becoming tolled.
This is classic Australian empty calorific growth:
- stuff in people so that new roads are needed;
- build roads with public/private partnerships and allow fat charges to the existing population to use them;
- standards of living actually fall given all you have done is privately tax folks to get home when before the people-stuffing they were doing it for free;
- pollies get to pretend that they are good economic managers as GDP rises;
- Transurban and its foreign backers get ever richer driving jobs to the city while raising the exchange rate and hollowing out suburban factories, requiring ever more use of its roads;
- rinse and repeat until death by debt.
Go Straya.
