YAKUTSK, September 17. /TASS/. The infrastructure mortgage mechanism may be used for solving the task of sustainable economic development and attracting investments to Russia’s Arctic zone, an expert of the Project Office for Arctic Development (PORA) Alexander Vorotnikov told TASS on sidelines of the forum, organized by the Association of Technical Universities of Russia and China (ATURC) on Arctic research in Yakutsk.
"Clearly, the vast development of the Arctic infrastructures requires respectively big financing," he said. "Specialists have been working on the mechanism of infrastructure mortgage, which is further development and improvement of the public-private partnership mechanism (PPP)."
"The work on the new mechanism continues for about a year now and is about to be over," he said. "The new instrument will make it possible to finance many investment projects in the Arctic, and will make realistic its sustainable development."
"A private partner takes a loan, builds a facility, and users of that facility will pay back the loan gradually - thus, the loan is settled in regular payments from the infrastructure owners and from budgets of various levels," the expert explained. "State guarantees will make those loans cheaper."
"In case of using the infrastructure mortgage mechanism, a private investor will credit a road or a bridge project, or any other infrastructure project, receiving guaranteed annual revenues," he added.
Infrastructure mortgage may be used for big projects, which will attract payments from users and private investors, he said.
"Thus, an infrastructure project is actually bought with money from private investors, and the facility’s user will be paying back the loan gradually," he continued. "The state guarantees used in infrastructure mortgage projects make them more attractive both for investors and for lenders, and also cut risks, related to returning the investments."
The North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk hosts between September 13 and 18 the first forum, organized by the Association of Technical Universities of Russia and China on Arctic research. The Association was organized in 2011 to unite efforts of Russian and Chinese universities in training highly-skilled specialists, in supporting exchange programs between students and teachers, and to develop the scientific-technical cooperation between Russia and China.