Austrian e-toll collection company could be contracted until 2021
Austrian electronic toll collection company, ETC, will be contracted by Sanral for at least one more year – but could see its contract extended to 2021 if the road agency so wishes.
The group, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kapsch Trafficom – the company that built the controversial e-tolling scheme in South Africa – clarified the terms of its contract, following reports that its time in the country was coming to an end.
According to ETC, the full operations portion of the contract included open road tolling services for a period of eight years, as well as five-year contracts for the violations processing centre and the transaction clearing house, from toll commencement (2013).
Under these terms, at least two components of the contract would have ended this year. However, contractual terms were amended through a settlement, signed by ETC and Sanral in 2017, which brought all the contracts under one six-year contract, ending in December 2019.
Additionally, the new contract allows for Sanral to extend the use of ETC’s services between 12 to 24 months – with a potential new termination date in December 2021.
ETC was fully acquired by Kapsch Trafficom in 2016. It started as a consortium comprised of TMT and Kapsch Trafficom, with the latter, through the former, winning the contract to build and operate the e-toll system in Gauteng in 2010.
The group’s CEO, Coenie Vermaak, has made headlines in 2018 through a fiercely vocal push against detractors of the e-tolling system.
Vermaak said that Sanral needs the money from e-tolling to maintain the roads around South Africa’s economic hub, and to launch the next phase of the Gaunteng Freeway Improvement Project, which has stalled due to non-payment.
However, e-toll critics have claimed in the past that ETC receives as much as 74% of all toll fees collected – with concerns that money is being fed out of South Africa into the hands of Kapsch, with only a fraction going towards road maintenance.
ETC and Sanral have dismissed this, calling the company a South African company, where all its operations and salaries are being paid locally and to local service providers. Only profits, if there were any, would go offshore.
The group gets paid a fixed fee, according to the terms of its contract, Sanral said at the time.
In its interim results for 2018/19, Kapsch Trafficom listed South Africa’s tolling system as its largest contingent liability, to the value of EUR34.2 million.
Read: Here’s what will happen to our roads if we don’t pay e-tolls
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