Government gets ready to cave.

Spain is home to some of the world’s biggest names in the infrastructure business, but many of those firms could soon be deprived of one of their most lucrative sources of income: the domestic road concessions business. Multi-decade contracts for some of the country’s busiest toll roads, some built as far back as the late 1960s, are about to end. To the companies’ horror, the government has repeatedly stated that the tolls will be abolished once the contracts run their course.

This has prompted frantic lobbying efforts from Spain’s biggest construction lobby, Seopan. The group has urged the government to renew the toll program for the AP-1, which crosses a well-traveled section of Northern Spain and whose concession ends on November 30. The lobby argues that it would be wrong to force cash-strapped taxpayers to pay for the maintenance and upkeep of a road that…