Although the territory will need to procure additional funds in order to carry out impending recovery and development projects in the near future, it is very unlikely that this money will come from the £300 million loan guarantee offered by the United Kingdom.
This conclusion has been drawn from a recent indication from Premier Dr. The Honourable Natalio Wheatley that utilising this opportunity is not an avenue available to the government at the moment.
“The guarantee, right now, is not on the table. But, you know it’s something that we can return to, to see if we can get it back on the table. We’ve essentially lost the opportunity to get the guarantee as of right now”, he said.
This Premier Wheatley said will not affect procurement procedures for small-scale projects due to take place in the near future, as the government had already determined that the sum of the loan offer was much too high to be taken for those purposes.
The premier noted, however, that the money may be sought out once again when the government is confronted by the demands of funding major projects such as the airport expansion.
“Whether we can get the opportunity again, it depends on us. But for the loan that we are exploring it wouldn’t be big enough really to justify the guarantee. We do have projects that we have to have a conversation about in the future. For instance, the expansion of the airport, that will cost upwards of $200 million… Where a guarantee and these low-interest rates would be helpful”, Wheatley said.
Wheatley said that the government is exploring other options in regards to securing funding for smaller projects, the details of which he cannot yet make public.