Text originally published in Guia Marítimo

The national highway concession program is facing a delicate moment. After an intense period of biddings carried out by both the ANTT (National Land Transport Agency) and by subnational entities, the sector's capacity to absorb new projects is beginning to show signs of exhaustion.

The heated agenda of recent years involved the bidding for large road systems. These competitive processes consumed a considerable volume of resources from a concentrated sector, which has few companies able to compete for multiple assets.

The extraordinary inflation that reached certain inputs also explains the environment of less competition. The increase in costs impacted the feasibility studies of the projects, especially those published in the first half of 2022.

Finally, the demand for these projects was perceived more critically. As they were structured during the pandemic, a period in which user behavior changed and an environment of uncertainty was created about the country's economic growth projections, road concessions were taken with greater skepticism by the market.

From the point of view of public entities, responsible for structuring the projects, this environment is challenging. To remain attractive, concessions must create ways to mitigate the impact of an unfavorable situation.

On March 11, 2022, Law 13.028/22 was enacted by the Municipality of Porto Alegre, which created two Chambers of Mediation and Tax Conciliation in the municipality, one linked to the Municipal Finance Department and the other linked to the Municipal Attorney General's Office. The city is the pioneer in Brazil to apply tax mediation.

The central idea of the legal norm is that the chambers mediate and conciliate conflicts related to the fulfillment of tax obligations, main or accessory, related to all municipal taxes. In this sense, all debt, judicialized or not, may be submitted to the chamber. About 45,000 tax executions are being processed at the Attorney General's Office of the Municipality of Porto Alegre alone. The new measure, therefore, aims to relieve the accumulation of judicial demands.

Also according to the Municipal Attorney's Office, the first tax mediation procedure was recently initiated after the enactment of the Law, which relates to the Tax on Services of Any Nature (ISS) owed by a legal entity.

Since, according to the National Council of Justice (CNJ), a tax execution has an average duration of 10 years in Brazil, the movement of the Rio Grande do Sul capital in favor of alternative dispute resolution methods is commendable and will surely serve as an example to other federation entities.

Manesco welcomed the evolution to the Leader profile in the WEPs (Women's Empowerment Principles) Gender Gap Analysis Tool.

The Leader profile represents companies that have taken "steps to define policies, implement them, measure them and report their progress", so that "gender equality is not only recognized as a human right, it is also valued as a driver of the implementation of responsible business practices".

An important victory for all the people that make up Manesco and also for the legal community, which has come to have this growing appreciation of gender inclusion strategies in internal policies and in the relationship with society as a whole.

Discussions on the regulation of the new railroad framework are advancing at ANTT, mainly in relation to the authorization procedure.

In her column on the Tecnologística portal, lawyer Mariana Magalhães Avelar highlights some of the main regulatory choices that have been presented and how they should be applied in the proposed regulation.

According to the lawyer, “good regulation, which inspires legal certainty and encourages investments, is essential to remove the risk that authorizations become paper railways, or worse, that they end up generating legal uncertainty that discourages railway undertakings already in operation. .”

Read the full article “Some insights into the regulatory opportunities and challenges of rail authorisations”.

The Municipality of Mogi das Cruzes has announced that it is studying several ways to guarantee emergency care in the city. One of them is the intervention in Santa Casa. Recently, the hospital reported that it does not intend to renew the contract for the use of the emergency room with the city hall.

In a statement to Diário TV 2nd Edition, the lawyer Mariana Chiesa Gouveia Nascimento explained, according to the legislation, what are the options of the city hall.

“The request, which is also expressly mentioned in law 8080, which is the SUS law, allows the public authority to assume the goods and services to serve a public purpose, in the event, for example, of the need to maintain a service that has been suspended by the organization”

See more on the link to the news “After Santa Casa does not renew the contract, Mogi City Hall is studying the implementation of its own emergency room”.