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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
ETC was fully acquired by Kapsch Trafficom in 2016.<\/a><\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n The group’s CEO, Coenie Vermaak, has made headlines in 2018 through a fiercely vocal<\/a><\/strong> push against detractors of the e-tolling system.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n However, e-toll critics have claimed<\/a><\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The group gets paid a fixed fee, according to the terms of its contract, Sanral said at the time<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n
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