Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff signed last week three contracts to manage three major federal highways through concession contracts. 

One of the contracts signed by the President was a 30-year concession to upgrade and operate a stretch of a highway linking the capital Brasilia to the port of Rio de Janeiro, the BR-040.

Brazilian toll road operator Invepar won the tender process in December 2013. The highway auctioned is a 937-kilometer stretch of Brazil's BR-040 highway between Brasilia and Juiz de Fora on the border of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro states.

Invepar is expected to invest R$4.45 billion (around US$2 billion) in BR-040 over the first five years of the concession. Invepar will duplicate 557 Km of road during the first five years.

The second contract involves the maintenance, operation, implementation of improvements and expansion of capacity of the 847-Km BR-163/MS highway in the center-west state of Mato Grosso do Sul,  one of the nation's centers of agricultural production, and was awarded to Brazilian group CCR, which is expected to invest about R$3.4 billion (US$1.46 billion) in the next five years to carry out the construction of additional lanes of traffic.

The third contract signed by the President, the BR-163/MT road concession, was awarded to Odebrecht. The project, with an investment during the first five years of R$2.38 billion (US$1.13 billion), involves a 851km segment of BR-163 in the state of Mato Grosso. It will have nine toll booths and entail widening 454km of the highway, also before the fifth year of the concession. The road stretch will have nine toll plazas.

These two last contracts were warded in November 2013.

The highway concessions were awarded last year as part of the government's Logistics Investment Program, through which some 7,500 kilometers (4,660 miles) of federal highways are to be placed under private management.