Attorney General to Lead Inquiry of Greenway Investor

Data Justifying Increase In Toll Rates Questioned

By Bill Brubaker (Contact)

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Virginia Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell (R) plans to review the business practices of an Australia-based company that controls the local operator of the Dulles Greenway, his spokesman said Tuesday.

McDonnell agreed to the inquiry after U.S. Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) raised concerns about whether the toll road’s owners misled state regulators who recently approved increases in the toll rates.

“We are looking into the overall situation and the financial questions that have been raised by the congressman and others,” said J. Tucker Martin, spokesman for the attorney general.

The Greenway owners recently won approval to increase tolls for a one-way trip from $3 to as much as $4.80 by 2012, a hike that has been denounced by Wolf and many state lawmakers.

A spokeswoman for the local group that runs the Greenway, Toll Road Investors Partnership II (TRIP II), said all the information it submitted to regulators was “factual and accurate.”

Photo: Tracy A. Woodward

Motorists travel on the Dulles Greenway in Loudoun County. (FILE PHOTO)

Wolf announced the attorney general’s review at a news conference Tuesday in an office park overlooking the Greenway’s main toll plaza. He was flanked by three Republican state legislative candidates who also expressed strong support for the review.

Later in the day, a Democratic delegate from Loudoun County, David E. Poisson, suggested that the timing of the news conference was no coincidence.

“We’re three weeks from an election,” he said. “What is happening here is an opportunity to draw attention to an issue — the toll-rate increases — that clearly has some ability to resonate with voters.”

It helps to have a score card handy to sort out the alphabet soup of entities that controls the Greenway, the 12-year-old highway that links the Dulles Toll Road to Leesburg and other communities in Loudoun.

The 14-mile expressway is owned and operated by TRIP II, a limited partnership. TRIP II is owned by Macquarie Infrastructure Group (MIG), an Australian firm that is one of the largest toll road operators in the world, and Macquarie Infrastructure Partners (MIP), a New York-based investment fund.

Wolf said he questions whether information submitted by the Greenway’s owners in support of the toll increases was accurate.

Some of his suspicions, he wrote McDonnell, were sparked by a recent Fortune magazine article that raised questions about how Sydney-based Macquarie Bank, the parent of MIG and MIP, raises and invests money.

Ann Huggins-Lawler, spokeswoman for TRIP II, referred questions about Macquarie to Alex Doughty, a New York-based spokesman for the Australian company. Doughty said he was not authorized to speak on the record about the company.

Huggins-Lawler said the focus should be on TRIP II, not the Macquarie entities, because it was TRIP II that dealt with the State Corporation Commission, which approved the toll increases.

“TRIP II’s financial statements are independently audited and have been examined regularly by the State Corporation Commission . . . since the Greenway opened in 1995,” she said in a statement.

At the news conference, Lynn Chapman, who is opposing Poisson in the 32nd House District, called on the SCC to reexamine the toll increase and review Macquarie’s financial statements.

The SCC’s research and data justifying the rate increases were flawed, he said, because they were based on an analysis of TRIP II, not the Macquarie entities.

Republican state Senate candidates Jill Holtzman Vogel and Patricia Phillips also voiced support at the news conference for the attorney general’s review.

“It’s our road,” Holtzman Vogel said. “And if the SCC won’t make the right decision, then we in the legislature have the obligation to make the right decision and take that road back if we have to.”

Poisson said state officials and lawmakers, including Wolf, have looked into the Macquarie entities and found nothing unusual.

“Given the amount of scrutiny to which this company has been subjected, it would be certainly quite a revelation to all of these parties if something was amiss,” he said.

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