Perhaps I could just stop there and open it up for questions?
Question One: Mr Macleod, in your release you said that a significant part of the new airport and related projects is expected to be met by the private sector. What do you mean by "significant?" And what kinds of project could qualify.
Mr Macleod: The main projects on that list which have scope for private participation are the airport and the Western Harbour Crossing. The crossing, of course, is very like our existing crossings and we would expect that to be a BOT project. A fully private project.
The airport is, of course, rather more complicated. As with Kai Tak there is scope for a number of facilities there to be built entirely by the private sector. I am thinking in terms of, obviously, cargo terminals, aircraft maintenance, catering, those sorts of facilities would normally be a hundred per cent private anyway. And then of the balance of the airport, as you said before, we view it as being an authority rather similar to the Mass Transit Railway Corporation in the sense that it would be financed partly by government equity and partly by the authority raising money, that is to say, borrowing, on the financial markets of the world. And they would be borrowing against a revenue flow, a revenue stream which the authority would obviously earn from the airport.
So those are the two main projects in which we can confidently expect to have private sector participation.
Question Two: But the word significant... What do you mean?...I mean the percentage...
Mr Macleod: The word significant is quite deliberate because, as I said in my introduction, I don't have a particular figure on it yet. We have not changed our assumptions about these two projects, particularly about the airport, because the Western Harbour Crossing wasn't in the original list, but about the airport. We are still confident that we should get a good, healthy, significant, measure of private sector participation. But there is no way I can put a figure on that at this stage. There are a number of consultancies going at the moment on the airport, partly on the design and planning and finance, and those results are not available yet.
Question Three: When will you be able to give us some idea?
Mr Macleod: Sometime next year, I don't know if I can be more precise than yet.
Miss Yue: I think if you really want to be more precise, it would be in the second to third quarter of the next calender year.
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