Hand-over

At the end of the project period, the project assets and business need to be handed to the grantor or to another project company (maybe even the same project company). The nature of hand-over, while it may be complex in design and implementation, is more important in its significance in the treatment of public assets and public perception of the nature of the project, in particular whether the project will be considered a quasi-privatization (which may raise public resistance) and does it satisfy public accounting rules (e.g. where return to the public sector might result in the project debt being counted as Government debt). However, the actual impact of reversion on the risk profile of the project and the relevance of the project to the government are limited. Every PPP project involves handover of some sort, whether to the government or to another private company, unless the project involves full the vesture by the government, or where the assets have reached the end of their lifecycle. But even then, most projects will contemplate some reversion right of the government, even if it is just in the event of project company default. Any additional information provided by including hand-over in the classification model would be outweighed by the added complexity of the model and was therefore rejected.