Sheinbaum Allies Rush to Lure Private Infrastructure Investment as Economy Sputters

Sheinbaum's Morena party has long favored state-centric energy projects, suspicious of profit-maximizing firms exercising too much control. In the past, the party's leaders have gone so far as to insist that would-be private partners to the country's state-owned oil and power companies defer most operational decisions to them or only take minority stakes. Under the infrastructure investment legislation, Sheinbaum would lead a new investment council designed to speed up decision-making, bring in more private capital and avoid duplicate efforts from the various involved groups. The council would include business representatives, in a bid to better understand what they see as major bottlenecks. All of it aims to complement a new public-private contract framework unveiled last year for the power and oil sectors that so far has only led to a handful of mostly small deals.