Čtvrtek 28. března 2024, svátek má Soňa
130 let

Lidovky.cz

Prague stops payments for ring-road bridge

  14:14

Cost of bridge on new section of Prague ring road being built by Metrostav more than doubles, police investigating

Nový Trójský most, součást komplexu Blanka, měl být dokončen ještě letos. Zcela jistě nebude. foto: Česká pozice

Inženýring dopravních staveb (IDS), the firm employed by Prague City Hall to oversee the construction of Blanka Tunnel and the new section of the Prague interior ring road, has stopped paying invoices from the construction firm Metrostav for the construction of the new road bridge across the River Vltava after costs rocketed to Kč 1.1 billion.

Having won the tender to build the new bridge to the north of central Prague with an offer of Kč 495 million, Metrostav now claims that due to a change in the design of the structure it will cost Kč 1.1 billion. Project supervisor IDS has stopped paying invoices issued by Metrostav and has demanded that the construction firm provides a detailed breakdown of all spending to date and stages of the project completed.

At the same time, questions remain as to the process by which City Hall approved the construction of a bridge design to replace that originally proposed by Metrostav and included in the coampny’s tender winning offer to build the new road.

According to IDS, by December 31, 2011, Metrostav had issued invoices with a total value of Kč 485 million. IDS is also demanding that Metrostav revise its budget.              

According to the firm Questima, the final price should certainly not exceed the originally quoted price offer by more than 20 percent“We were commissioned by the [City Hall] tender commission to assess whether the prices quoted by the project planners were realistic, and we concluded that yes they are,” Helena Kalivodová, statuary representative of the firm Questima, told the daily Hospodářské noviny (HN) referring to the price for the bridge quoted by Metrostav in its tender-winning offer in 2007.

According to Kalivodová, technical features of the revised bridge design and factors such as inflation could have caused costs to grow, but the final price should certainly not exceed the originally quoted price offer by more than 20 percent at the very most. In its original evaluation of the plans for the revised bridge now under construction, Questima estimated the overall cost at around Kč 465 million.

Questions remain as to how Prague City Hall’s Municipal Investment Department (OMI) allowed conditions whereby Metrostav is now in a position to demand double the price for the construction of the bridge, albeit with an altered design.

“The city’s Executive Council decided to hold an architectural competition for the so-called new Troja Bridge, which is considerably more expensive than the originally planned simple bridge, which according to the tender documentation was supposed to be built,” former deputy mayor of Prague Karel Březina (Social Democrats, ČSSD) offered in way of an explanation for the price rise about a year ago on Czech Television (ČT).

Over a year ago anticorruption police descended upon the offices of the Prague administration and confiscated documents relating to the Troja Bridge tender. “Criminal proceedings have been launched under suspicion of fraud and neglecting responsibilities when managing foreign property,” police spokesman Jaroslav Ibehej was cited in Tuesday’s edition of HN. According to the daily, former OMI head Jiří Toman is a prime suspect in the police investigation. Toman, who no longer works in City Hall, is reportedly a closer associate of the scandal-ridden “Godfather” lobbyist Roman Janoušek.        

Hospodářské noviny has discovered that plans were made to hold a competition for a revised design of the bridge before the public tender containing the specifications for the original bridge design was announced in April 2006. “We began preparing the architectural competition for the bridge in the summer of 2005,” Pavel Štěpan from the firm Deltaplan which was commissionedby Prague City Hall to organize the competition, told HN. According to Deltaplan, the revised bridge should cost no more than 25 percent more than the originally planned construction.

According to HN, several construction firms were interested in building the revised design of the Troja Bridge, but the OMI refused to negotiate with them and simply awarded the new bridge project to Metrostav without an additional tender being held. Those firms reportedly offered to build the bridge for between Kč 600 million and Kč 700 million.

Prague City Hall spokeswoman Tereza Krásenská refused to talk to HN about the Troja Bridge case on the grounds of the ongoing police investigation.

Autor:

FOR KIDS by měl být zážitkem pro celou rodinu, říká Monika
FOR KIDS by měl být zážitkem pro celou rodinu, říká Monika

Monika Pavlíčková (35 let) je maminkou dvou dcer, sedmileté Terezy a čtyřleté Laury, a zároveň také manažerkou obchodního týmu společnosti ABF,...