Ana Pastor offers collaboration from Spanish companies for ambitious infrastructure plan in Republic of Iran

The Minister for Public Works, Ana Pastor, met on Monday with her Iranian counterpart, the Minister for Transport and Urban Development, Abbas Ahmad Akhoundi, to whom she offered the extensive experience of Spanish construction and transport companies in the ambitious infrastructure plan that the Iranian Government proposes to carry out as soon as the sanctions imposed by the UN are lifted, which is due to take place before the end of the year.

Ana Pastor highlighted "the extensive international prestige enjoyed by Spanish companies in the field of transport infrastructure", and stressed the great opportunity that the plan to extend the local railway network represents for them, with a scheduled investment of almost 23 billion euros over the next six years.

The minister highlighted the participation of Spanish companies in the international arena and the successful award of major contracts such as the so-called "desert high-speed line" and the participation in the construction of a high-speed line in California. Furthermore, there are various Spanish companies that aspire to win contracts of these characteristics in projects that are starting to be tendered in countries such as Mexico, the United Kingdom and Norway. The Minister for Public Works also recalled that it is the Spanish public entity Ineco that is carrying out the feasibility study for building a high-speed line in Egypt.

The Spanish minister and her Iranian counterpart also spoke about the formulas for making progress on establishing direct air routes between destinations in the two countries. Various Iranian companies have shown a great interest in establishing direct routes to both Madrid and Barcelona; and a Spanish airline in opening a direct route between Barcelona and Teheran during the summer months. Ana Pastor explained that during her talk she agreed with Abbas Ahmad Akhoundi to start work immediately on renewing the agreement on air transport - the previous agreement dates back to 1996 - to draft a new framework agreement as soon as possible.

On Monday morning, the minister also held a work meeting with the Mayor of Teheran, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, responsible for metropolitan transportation, to whom she offered the experience acquired by Spanish companies in such significant projects as the metro system in Lima and Riyadh. The city of Teheran, which already has 50 kilometres of metro network, is decisively committed to this method of transport to relieve congestion in the city which is home to 13 million people.

The project to extend Teheran International Airport is also very ambitious, where traffic currently exceeds 12 million passengers per year and which, in just its first phase, expects to increase this to 26.5 million. The overall project, valued at 1 billion euros, will enable it to handle annual traffic in excess of 90 million passengers.

As regards collaboration between companies of Grupo Fomento, the engineering company Ineco has previously worked with the Iranian Government on a project to electrify the railway track and Renfe has reached various agreements in the past for the sale of rolling stock. Minister Pastor also offered her Iranian counterpart all the experience of Aena and Adif, the former being the leading airport operator in the world while the latter manages the largest high-speed network in Europe, which is the second largest in the world.