The Germany Ministry of Finance is considering selling a stake of just under 50 percent in the country’s highways to allow it to develop the network’s infrastructure more efficiently, Der Spiegel magazine said on Saturday.
Ownership of the 13,000km network, the world’s second-largest behind the US and famous for having no speed limits along thousands of its kilometers, is divided evenly between the federal government and the country’s 16 states.
German Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schaeuble is considering selling off all but a tiny fraction of the latter share, leaving Berlin with a controlling stake.
It was not clear how much such a sale would raise. However, the federal government receives about 4 billion euros (US$4.34 billion) per year for its toll on trucks.
The ministry believes that insurers and other investors in search of investments with solid yields during a prolonged phase of low interest rates would be eager to buy stakes currently held by the 16 federal states in such a highway privatization, Der Spiegel said.
By controlling the highways by itself, Berlin’s efficiency to build and repair highways and other parts of the network such as bridges would be greater.
Members of parliament told reporters that Schaeuble had presented only rough outlines of his proposal to a budget committee last week, saying that the federal government would keep a majority controlling stake if it were privatized.
The idea of privatizing Germany’s highways has been floated periodically, and any sale would almost certainly have to wait until after national elections in September next year.
German Minister of Economic Affairs Sigmar Gabriel, the leader of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD) which share power with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat-led conservatives, is not in favor.
“There won’t be any privatization of the roads nor the operators of the motorways,” a spokeswoman for Gabriel said.
Officials said leaders of the federal and state governments agreed at a meeting on Oct. 14 that the federal government should be responsible on its own for building and operating the motorways. However, the two sides are still discussing the issue.
Separately, the German government has bowed to pressure to water down its carbon reduction targets for industry in the final version of its climate action plan, a document seen by reporters showed.
The government is now calling for German industry to cut its carbon emissions by 20 rather than 30 percent by 2030 compared with 2014, according to the document, that was seen on Friday.
The plan sets out how Europe’s biggest economy expects to move away from fossil fuels and cut carbon emissions by 95 percent by 2050 to implement pledges made as part of a global climate treaty agreed in Paris in September last year.
In the new plan, the emissions-cutting target for power stations was reduced, although only slightly.
The document also dropped a previous government call to set a minimum price for carbon permits auctioned by countries under the EU’s Emissions Trading System.
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