The Federal Government might miss a central goal with the financial reform of the Autobahn GmbH. A study by infrastructure economics professors Thorsten Becker and Hauke Pfaff, along with lawyer Georg Hermes, commissioned by the union Verdi and reported on by Spiegel, states there are “significant reasons” to classify the company’s external capital as federal debt in light of the debt brake.
According to a draft law from Minister for Transport Steffen Bilger (CDU), the operating company will be allowed to take out its own loans in the future. Furthermore, it will receive revenue from the truck toll. Bilger assumes that these loans will not be counted as federal debt, partly because the state is not liable for them.
However, in the view of the study authors, the model shifts financial burdens into the future because the toll revenues and loans are insufficient to cover the overall needs of the expressways. They argue that this construct should be legally assessed as an abusive circumvention of the debt brake.
