Il project financing nel Regno Unito

The UK legislation does not set forth systematic rules on project financing. The British experience recorded in the second half of the past century an escalating development of governmental policies aimed at increasing the involvement of private-sector resources in the provision of public services through the combination of contractual obligations and warranties of several entities, actually from private and public sectors, structured so to avoid that either party undertake an exclusive financial responsibility fro the projects. In the past twenty years the project financing techniques have endured different conditions. At the beginning, Governments led by Mrs. Thatcher established the Ryrie Rules based on two fundamental principles: the admissibility of private sector financing conditioned to the reduction of costs for the public sector; the costs of projects financed by private-sector operators in the framework of governmental programmes had to be anyway sustainable with the public-sector funds of the competent authority. Subsequently a programme for gathering private-sector capital in the provision of public services through PPP techniques, which had to be made compliant with the Community law on public procurement, was elaborated.