Lessons learned
Blaylock believes that the lessons learned from this long process can be applied to any potential project participant in developing international markets: be prepared to learn a lot and be prepared to teach as well. A successful project requires close teamwork among all the project participants, and sensitivity to each other’s issues and needs. As those involved in concurrent IPP ventures in other less developed countries would agree, financing takes longer than usual with any first-of-a-kind project, especially when there are difficult risk-allocation issues. Often the process is just as important as the substance.
Miguel Rubio, a lawyer with US Eximbank, believed at that time that the Mexican government had learned about the need to develop project-financing and risk-allocation structures that are in line with the world market. Ana Demel, partner of Cleary, Gottleib, Steen & Hamilton, believes that the most important lesson concerns the need to have rational, well-thought-out bid specifications, with careful consideration of local-law constraints and a realistic approach to meeting market requirements. When there are flaws in the specifications, a lot of time and money is required to work around the problems. Demel notes that delay is not only expensive and frustrating for all parties, but
also brings with it a host of other risks such as the uncertain policies of a new government.
Because this was Mexico’s first quasi-IPP venture, the CFE encountered many problems that it should, perhaps, have foreseen but did not when drawing up the rather simple bid specifications and draft lease agreement. Examples include the Pemex monopoly on pipelines and the inability of a commercial lease under Mexican law to be used as a basis for project financing. Part of the problem was that the CFE is a large enterprise, and in the past the people responsible for planning power projects were not the same as those responsible for financing. As a result of what the CFE learned from the Samalayuca II project, bid specifications for later projects were better thought out and more attuned to the requirements of international project financing.
The Samalayuca II project financing illustrates how the Latin American region is a substantially different kind of a place to do business in than it had been 10 to 15 years before. Blaylock noted that the whole region is moving toward private capital rather than government financing for power, water systems, ports and other types of infrastructure projects.