The Finance Ministry said Friday it has reopened the eco-tender — a nationwide environmental cleanup that could potentially be the largest tender in Czech history, worth up to Kč 115 billion ($6.65 billion) — with bids now due on Sept. 5. The deadline has been extended several times over the past three years due to legal issues.
Interested parties will have access to the lists of sites to be cleaned — most of which are heavy-industry sites dating back to the Communist period — as of Monday (April 4).
The Finance Ministry launched the eco-tender in December 2008, and set the tender’s maximum value at Kč 115 billion. The aim was to contract a single company or consortium to undertake the cleanup of all the toxic environmental sites in the Czech Republic with stated aim of accelerating the process.
The three companies that made it past the first round of earlier version of the tender are Geosan Group, a Czech general building contractor that has a small environmental division; Marius Pedersen Engineering (part of Veolia Environment); and Environmental Services, owned by Czech-Slovak equity group J&T.
In the first round, the Finance Ministry eliminated three companies, including PPF Advisory, connected to the group of companies controlled by Petr Kellner. PPF Advisory filed a complaint over its exclusion with the Office for the Protection for Competition (ÚOHS) over its exclusion but later withdrew from the process.
