The Strategic Planning at Baghdad Provincial Council on Tuesday announced the Ministry of Planning's approval to include Baghdad's monorail project in the 2020 projects plan.
For his part, Nizar Sultan, head
of the Planning Committee, said that the committee ended the project's draft
and informed the planning ministry with all details and companies' bids to
carry out the monorail project.
He added that a meeting is
scheduled to be held between the planning ministry, the strategic planning committee
and Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, in addition to a consortium of
Korean and French companies, who are bidding to implement the project, to
finalize it.
In 2018, a consortium of
French transport giant Alstom and South Korea's Hyundai bid for carrying out
the project with a soft loan from a consortium of five foreign banks led by
Germany's Deutsche Bank. The loan came with a tenor of 19 years, moratorium for
the first five years and interest rate of 2.5 percent.
In
December 2017, Alstom said in a press statement that it signed an MoU with the
Iraqi government for the implementation of monorail projects in Baghdad and
Basra.