Under the terms of the convention of 1903, the Turkish Government undertook partially to finance the construction of the Bagdad Railway. For each kilometre of the line built the Government agreed to issue to the Company the sum of 275,000 francs, nominal value, in Imperial Ottoman bonds, to be secured by a first mortgage on the railway and its properties.[47] The payment of interest and sinking fund on these bonds was to be guaranteed by the assignment to the Public Debt Administration for this purpose of the revenues of certain of the districts through which the railway was to pass. For the purpose of financing the first section of two hundred kilometres beyond Konia, there was delivered to the Company on March 5, 1903, an issue of fifty-four million francs of “Imperial Ottoman Bagdad Railway Four Per Cent Bonds, First Series.”[48] Similar payment for the construction of subsequent sections was to be made the subject of further agreement between the Government and the concessionaires. In addition to supplying in this manner the actual funds for the building of the railway, the Ottoman Government guaranteed gross operating receipts of forty-five hundred francs annually for each kilometre of the line open to traffic. If the receipts failed to reach that sum, the Government was to reimburse the Company for the deficiency. If the receipts amounted to more than forty-five hundred francs per kilometre in any given year, the excess over that amount to ten thousand francs was to belong to the Government; any excess over and above ten thousand francs was to be divided sixty per cent to the Government, forty per cent to the Railway. The Government also agreed to reimburse the Company, in thirty annual payments of three hundred fifty thousand francs, for such improvements as might be necessary to prepare the Anatolian Railways for the initiation of a through express service to the Persian Gulf and, furthermore, to subsidize that express service at the rate of three hundred fifty thousand francs annually from the date of the completion of the main line to Aleppo.[49]