Post by account_disabled on Mar 13, 2024 22:27:09 GMT -5
At the beginning of the month, president-elect Jair Bolsonaro (PSL) revealed the plan to merge transport regulatory agencies to streamline concessions. The measure, according to Bolsonaro, aims to end the political rigging of the agencies.
With the merger, the National Land Transport Agency (ANTT), the National Aviation Agency (Anac) and the National Waterway Transport Agency (Antaq) will become the National Transport Agency.
Most of these bodies emerged during the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government, between 1996 and 2001, with the function of intermediating the relationship between the government and companies that provide services of public interest.
Experts consulted by ConJur state that B2B Lead unifying three very different agencies into a single agency will represent a significant change for regulated entities.
For Claudio Timm , from Tozzini Freire Advogados, the proposal to merge transport regulatory agencies could have advantages and disadvantages. According to Timm, one of the advantages would be the reduction of public spending, with the reduction of certain administrative and physical structures that were repeated in the three agencies and which could now be concentrated in one.
“As examples, we can mention parliamentary consultancy, communications consultancy, etc. Another advantage would probably be improving dialogue with the Ministry of Transport and other public and private entities, which previously had to interact with the three agencies. Another advantage may be the better treatment of large and complex projects, which deal with points of more than one mode of transport, such as ports, city-airports, etc.”, he explains.
As a disadvantage, according to the expert, we can mention the difficulty of maintaining a large concentrated structure to deal with specific technical issues, which are specific to each mode of transport, such as different regulatory frameworks, commercial logics and project structures.
“The new agency will probably need to have several superintendencies to take care of technical aspects of each regulated sector. Another disadvantage is that the new agency will probably not be able to reduce many management positions, as the agencies are headed by boards and the members of these boards are naturally experts in one mode of transport or another.
Therefore, it is possible that the large agency will end up having to establish a chamber of directors or advisors to decide technical matters in each area and a large committee to deal with more administrative and generic issues”, he says.
According to the lawyer, for this last reason, “if the interest of the new government of elected president Jair Bolsonaro is to reduce the number of directors to avoid party political appointments, it does not seem to us that the solution is to merge the agencies into one, as it will possibly need several leaders. For this problem, the best solution seems to be the adoption of greater rigor in the appointment of directors for agencies, seeking greater political-partisan shielding”