Project Finance Contract Summary
- 02:18
An overview of the different contracts in a project finance transaction
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Transcript
The contracts and counterparties are very important in any project finance transaction or structure. The center of everything is the special purpose vehicle. That's the main legal entity that owns and operates the contract. Key in many projects will be the government. Often the government will have a concession agreement to allow the project to operate. They'll issue permits and any other required authorizations. The rest of the contracts can be broadly split up into three groups. The first of these are the financing contracts. The shareholders themselves will have their own agreement, a shareholder agreement. In some cases, the shareholding may be split in between common equity and some sort of deeply subordinated shareholder loan. Then we have the debt investors, and they could either be bond holders or probably more commonly a syndicated loan provided by a syndicate of banks. In addition, as part of the overall package, there'll be an insurance package that will cover insurable risks. Those are the main financing contracts. Now, we also need construction contracts. Construction contracts broadly fit into two components. One is the engineering contract, and the other is a construction contract. Sometimes you'll have a procurement contract, and these three are known as the EPC Engineering Procurement construction. The last group of contracts are the operational contracts, the supplier, which will supply the raw materials to the operator of the plant. For example, if there's an oil refinery, they'll be providing crude oil. They'll usually be governed by a put or pay contract, and this is where the supplier has to deliver the product or will have to pay compensation. Then potentially you'll have one or two major buyers who are gonna buy the actual output of the contract, and that's known as a take or pay contract. So you either have to take it or again, you have to pay compensation. Lastly, you have the actual operator, so this is the entity that's going to operate and manage the contract on an ongoing basis once it's operational.