Poland dumps foreign investor from airport project in favour of state firm

Keep our news free from ads and paywalls by making a donation to support our work!

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Poland’s government has announced that a state company will become the strategic investor in plans to build a major new airport near Warsaw, replacing a Franco-Australian consortium that had been chosen under the previous government.

“We want the largest project in Poland to be coordinated by a Polish company, so that CPK [the Central Communication Port, as the project is known] is a completely Polish initiative,” announced infrastructure minister Dariusz Klimczak on Monday.

He noted that a letter of intent has been signed for Polish Airports (PPL), a state firm that already manages Poland’s airports, to commit 9 billion zloty (€2.1 billion) to take up to a 49% share in the state-owned company behind the CPK project.

✈️ Polski kapitał w CPK i modernizacja Lotniska Chopina 🚀

🛫Dzisiaj wielki dzień dla polskiego lotnictwa i przyszłości CPK. List intencyjny, który w obecności ministra infrastruktury @DariuszKlimczak oraz sekretarza stanu i Pełnomocnika Rządu ds @CPK_PL @LasekMaciej podpisali… pic.twitter.com/qlNzfWZ5Sb

— Ministerstwo Infrastruktury (@MI_GOV_PL) December 23, 2024

In October last year, when Poland was ruled by the former Law and Justice (PiS) government, a consortium of France’s Vinci Airports and the Australia-based IFM Global Infrastructure Fund had been selected as the investment partner to take that 49% stake (the remaining 51% belongs to the Polish state treasury).

But now, with PPL’s involvement, the “organisation and management of the new airport will be entirely in Polish hands”, said Klimczak, who called it “the most important organisational and capital decision” that has been made since the launching of the CPK project.

The head of CPK, Filip Czernicki, also confirmed that “talks with the foreign investor will not be completed”. He likewise argued that an arrangement with PPL makes more sense because future profits will remain in Poland, reports the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

 

At the same time, Klimczak announced that a decision had been made to modernise Warsaw’s Chopin airport, which is currently the largest and busiest in Poland, serving over 20 million passengers already this year. The new investment will bring its capacity up to 30 million by 2029.

However, the plans for CPK envisage that, when the new CPK airport opens in 2032, all passenger traffic from Chopin will be transferred there. The planned upgrade to Chopin is therefore just a “bridging solution” to meet growing demand while CPK is completed, said the infrastructure ministry.

PPL’s president, Andrzej Ilków, said on Monday that the new agreement will see Chopin’s staff offered the chance to move to CPK too.

Design concepts for Poland’s planned new mega-airport, prepared by the firm of renowned architect Sir Norman Foster, have been unveiled.

The transport hub, located halfway between Warsaw and Łódź, is forecast to serve 65 million passengers a year by 2060https://t.co/elj2fvhb6Q

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) July 6, 2023

CPK – which as well as an airport will include major rail and road connections – was a flagship project of the former PiS government, which unveiled a design concept last year and chose the Vinci-IFM consortium as an investment partner.

However, when a new ruling coalition, led by Donald Tusk, replaced PiS in office one year ago there were doubts about whether and how it would proceed with the project. Eventually, the new government confirmed in June this year that it would move ahead with the plans.

However, Tusk said at the time that the target for passenger numbers at the new airport would be scaled back to 34 million annually. Under PiS, the plans had envisioned an initial target of 40 million with the option to eventually scale up to 100 million (more than Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport, currently has).

The overall investment in the airport is projected to amount to 44.7 billion zloty (€10.5 billion). Under the plans announced yesterday (which will be finalised in the fourth quarter of 2025), the shareholders in the project, PPL and CPK, will contribute 30-40% of that funding with the rest covered by a bond issue.

A planned “mega-airport” in central Poland, which was a flagship project of the former government, will continue, @donaldtusk has confirmed.

But there will now be more emphasis on regional infrastructure, he says. “Poland will become one big megalopolis” https://t.co/OzGGvVHSdU

— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) June 26, 2024

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.



Main image credit: CPK (press materials)

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.