The Lagos State Government has been given full powers to take over the ownership of the Lekki Concession Company (LCC).
The powers were granted by the Lagos House of Assembly who approved Gov. Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s request for the state to assume full ownership of Lekki Concession Company (LCC) Ltd, a privately owned company.
This followed a resolution by the House to approve the governor’s request sequel to the presentation of the Committee on Finance report during plenary session in Lagos on Monday.
The request had come from the Executive since 21st June and was assigned to the Committee on Finance to further look into it and report its findings to the House.
In his presentation, the committee’s Chairman, Mr Rotimi Olowo (Somolu I), said the state would become the subsisting shareholders of LCC with 75 per cent shareholding and the Office of Public Private Partnerships, shareholding of 25 per cent, respectively.
The lawmaker added that this was sequel upon the buy-out of all the shareholding interest of the company by the state government.
Olowo further said the original $53.9 million loan obligation from a private sector facility had been resolved after series of engagement between Africa Development Bank (AFDB), the company and the state government.
He said: “The agreement was to convert the loan to a public sector facility with the benefit of a considerable reduction in interest charges of 1.02 per cent of $1.12 million biannual.
“This is against the 4.12 per cent of $2.746 million per bi-annual, therefore, giving a savings of $1.16 million bi-annual or $3.24milliom per annum.
“The House, therefore, granted the executive the approval to convert the AFDB loan to the public sector loan backed up by sovereign Federal Government guarantee on behalf of the state government.
“This also authorise the state government to issue a counter guarantee in favour of the Federal Government along with an Irrevocable Standing Payment Order (ISPO) to deduct from the state’s statutory allocation.”
Olowo noted that the servicing of the loan obligations would have a maturity till August 2034.
LCC, is a special purpose vehicle which set up to execute the Lekki Toll Road Concession Project and the operations of the Lekki Ikoyi Link Bridge under a public private partnership (PPP) scheme.
It uses the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model of Infrastructure delivery.
LCC was set up to provide high quality road infrastructure and related services along the Lekki, Lagos, Nigeria.
The company has been under intense scrutiny especially during the Lekki Toll gate #EndSARS incident of 20th October 2020 in which youths were said to have been violently attacked by soldiers.
The incident resulted in the setting up of an administrative panel by the Lagos State Government to review the incident and cases of police brutality which was the root case of the #EndSARS protests that led to the toll gate incident.
Prior to the incident, the company had been embroiled in tussles with Lekki residents over the tolling of the Lekki-Epe expressway,
