São Paulo mayor Bruno Covas has embarked on a roadshow in New York and will follow this with further presentations in London through early June to sell assets and create public-private partnerships for parks and cemeteries in various parts of the city.
The first in a long list of areas to be auctioned by 2020 is Anhembi, a complex with 1.68m sqm available for development in the heart of São Paulo. The space currently houses a convention center and the Sambodrome where the city’s yearly carnival parade takes place and the only part of the structure that cannot be touched by any potential buyer.
Banco Plural won the bid to define parameters and the price for Anhembi and put it up for auction by September on Brazil’s B3 stock exchange. The municipal secretary in charge of Privatization, Wilson Point, said the opportunity to build in the heart of the state capital would attract buyers.
Speaking in New York, Mayor Covas said the sale allows city hall to invest in priority programs for the population. “We can’t use the privatization proceeds for expenses, only for investments” he said. “And this money is earmarked for education, health, urban security and mobility.”
Among the Mayor’s plans for the expected cash injection are day-care centers and ducts for the network of streams that permeate the underground of the metropolis, home for 12m people, but in reality shared by more than 20m that live in the metropolitan area.
Brazil’s former Development Minister Luis Fernando Furlan joined the São Paulo city government officials in New York on May 15 and said the city needed to go ahead with privatizations because “bureaucracy is power and it is really hard to innovate in the public sector.”