'Turkey’s PPP experience significant on global scale'

By Aysu Bicer and Yunus Girgin

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey has completed nearly 100 public-private partnership (PPP) projects worth $100 billion over the past 15 years, a top Turkish businessman said Monday.

During the fifth Istanbul PPP online summit, Nail Olpak, chairman of the Foreign Economic Relations Board of Turkey (DEIK), emphasized that Turkey’s PPP experience is significant on a global scale, adding various PPP models are used in sectors such as transportation, health and energy.

"Turkey's transportation infrastructure is going through a tremendous transformation process," Olpak noted.

He said the government has put the Build-Operate-Transfer model into practice via enormous projects such as the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge, Istanbul Airport, the Eurasia Tunnel Project, the North Marmara Highway and the Baku-Tblisi-Kars Railroad Project.

"In the health sector, Turkey has also undertaken significant reforms in recent years by building integrated healthcare campuses [or city hospitals] in major cities through the build-rent-transfer model of PPP.”

He said as the country has ambitious targets to upgrade its infrastructure, more and more projects will be coming in the pipeline in different sectors in the future.

Noting that COVID-19 has brought some changes in the model of PPP, Olpak said "UN sustainability principles and human-oriented PPP projects become more important for the future."