Felipe Guinea, guest expert at the European Infrastructure Finance Summit 2019

Felipe Guinea, Managing Director of Almar Water Solutions, participated yesterday in the European Infrastructure Finance Summit, held in the Hotel Riu Plaza España, in Madrid. The European Infrastructure Finance Summit 2019 offered a general outlook of the European infrastructure market and brought together more than 250 specialists from the public and private sectors to openly debate what the future of infrastructure in Europe might look like.

Felipe Guinea was a panel member in the session titled Water Infrastructure: Meeting a New and Pressing Challenge, along with other specialists from the water and finance sectors. Felipe, as an expert in the development and financing of water infrastructure, gave his opinion on the lack of project structuring in the sector and indicated that private companies are hungry to invest in the industry.

Another question covered by this panel was whether the European Union and the Member States are currently capable of developing the water infrastructure required to respond to these challenges and how the failure to allocate specific budgets is affecting the industry, when there is currently significant liquidity in the market that could complement and contribute to this development in a faster and more balanced manner.

Traditionally blessed with abundant rainfall, natural reserves and an extensive network of water infrastructure, today Europe is facing a totally different paradigm in which severe drought and a population explosion are exerting pressure on a system that in some areas has not been renovated for many decades.

Almar Water Solutions, with offices in the Netherlands and in Spain, deals with this problem close up and offers both financial and technological solutions that allow governments and institutions to have access to this infrastructure and to provide their citizens with a resource as vital as water.