Originally from the Journal of Damages in International Arbitration

Preview Page

MS. HEMMINGSEN: Good morning. Good afternoon to everyone. We’re going to now move on to panel one, The Future of PPP Contracts in Latin America: Beyond Pandemics and Broken Economic Equilibrium. Let me introduce myself very briefly before presenting the topic for today. I’m Luli Hemmingsen, a partner in the international arbitration practice group of King and Spalding based in New York. I’m originally from Argentina. My practice focuses on commercial international arbitration, investor state arbitration and public international law matters, with a particular emphasis in Latin America. I handle disputes in English, Spanish and Portuguese. I’ll give you a brief introduction as to the topics that we’re going to cover today and then introduce my colleagues and co-panelists and our moderator.

Today, we’re going to discuss private public participation; contracts and projects known as PPP, PPA, PPI. These contracts and projects come in all shapes and sizes; contracts can be structured differently, depending greatly on the regulatory framework of each jurisdiction. But the key aspect of all PPP contracts, irrespective of how they’re structured, is that they will entail the participation of both private and public players in different ways. Latin America has been a world leader in PPP projects during the last decades. For example, as of 2019, Latin America had amassed the highest amount of investment and PPP projects worldwide, in the range of over $700 billion, which represented almost 40% of the world total. Of those $700 billion, 300 billion have been investments from the last decade alone, which shows how much of that investment has been concentrated in the last few years. Latin America also presents the particularity of being the region with the largest amount of private financing of PPP projects. So, while projects can be structured through either or both private and public financing, Latin America is a region that has consistently had the largest percentage of private financing—around 40% when compared to other regions worldwide. And this is not a surprise.