I'm pretty sure it stands for 'Buy - Operate - Transfer'. I hadn't heard the term either until a couple years ago. Apparently, it's a growing trend in Taiwan for construction of government projects. It seems to me to be just a new way to rip off the taxpayer while giving the bureaucrats yet another means for getting fat kickbacks.

I think it works like this. The govt. wants to build, oh, let's say an illegal hotel on public property. Or, another real life example here in Taitung, they want to build a new campus for a public university. It's expensive, so they allow a private company to build and operate the project for a profit for X number of years, at which point the project is returned to the government.

I don't see how the public benefits from this. At my uni, for example, the new student dorms parking areas are BOT. The dorms are expensive as hell, and I actually have to pay NT1,000/year to park on my own campus, a public campus. So, Bob Public gets it up the ass while the private constructions companies rake in the money and the local politicians get a fat payoff.