ZAGREB, August 9, 2019 – The State Commission for Supervision of Public Procurement Procedures on Friday confirmed receipt of a complaint lodged by the Greek company J&P Avax against the Hrvatske Ceste road operator to award the Austrian construction company Strabag a contract to build the Duboka-Šparagovići section of access roads to the Pelješac Bridge.
On August 7, the Commission confirmed to Hina that Strabag had filed a complaint against the selection of J&P Avax as the contractor to build southern access roads to the Pelješac Bridge.
The project in question concerns two sections of the Ston bypass road – Šparagovići-Prapratno and Prapratno-Doli.
Hrvatske Ceste on July 26 decided that the Ston bypass road and its sections Šparagovići -Prapratno and Prapratno-Doli should be built by Avax, whose bid amounted to 511.5 million kuna, while the Duboka-Šparagovići section was to be built by Strabag, whose offer amounted to 478.3 million kuna.
Complaints against those decisions could be filed within a period of ten days.
Tenders for the construction of the Šparagovići-Prapratno and Prapratno-Doli sections, which make up the southern, 18-kilometre-long part of access roads to the Pelješac Bridge, and for the construction of the 12-kilometre Duboka-Šparagovići section, were published last year but complaints by participants in the bidding procedure against decisions on the selection of contractors have been preventing the start of construction work on them.
The agreement for the construction of the Pelješac Bridge with access roads, worth 2.08 billion kuna without VAT, was signed on 23 April 2018 by Hrvatske Ceste and China Road and Bridge Corporation. Eighty-five percent of eligible costs will be covered by the EU.
The construction of the Pelješac Bridge is the first of four phases of a project for road connectivity with southern Dalmatia. The other phases include the construction of access roads, and the construction of the Ston bypass road includes the construction of a bridge.
Thanks to exceptional efforts by Chinese workers, the Pelješac Bridge could be completed before access roads, whose construction has been slowed down by red tape, bringing into question the tentative deadline of 31 January 2022, when the entire project is expected to be completed.
More Pelješac Bridge news can be found in the Business section.
