Montenegro Officially Annuls Concession Agreement with Konstruktor

The Montenegrin government officially annulled the concession agreement for the construction of the highway through Montenegro with the Croatian consortium led by the Split-based Konstruktor on Thursday and decided to continue the already initiated negotiations with the Greek-Israeli consortium Aktor, as the second-ranked bidder.

This puts an end to a year-long negotiation with Konstruktor and opens the possibility of engaging other participants in the tender for the “job of the century,” or the largest investment in Montenegro. “The government has set a deadline of one month for negotiations with the Greeks, and after that, in an additional two months, it would bind Aktor to finalize the financial structure,” said Andrija Lompar, the Minister of Transport and Maritime Affairs in the Montenegrin government, to reporters.

Representatives of the Greek-Israeli consortium Aktor announced that they have not yet received an official invitation from the Montenegrin government to discuss the construction of the highway under their conditions. They reiterated that they are ready for this job, that they have sufficient funds, and expressed their willingness to adjust the previously offered price. The Podgorica daily Dan calculated that the Bar-Boljare highway, if built by the Aktor consortium, would be the most expensive road in the world of all time.

The Greek-Israeli consortium Aktor, with whom the Montenegrin government will negotiate until the end of March, estimated that the construction of the first section, 43.5 kilometers long, from Smokovac to Mateševo, would cost 1.24 billion euros, or an average of 28.5 million euros per kilometer. This is almost three times more than the cost per kilometer of the highway through Slovenia (9.77 million euros per kilometer), regardless of the unfavorable terrain configuration. For comparison, the most demanding section of the Zagreb-Dubrovnik highway will cost 7.14 million euros per kilometer, the paper reports.

However, in the Montenegrin public, there is a prevailing regret that the Croatian consortium did not manage to secure the “job of the century” and that a lot of time has already been lost.
Podgorica media report statements from Croatian officials that the job was not well prepared and that the government in Zagreb did everything it could to save the job.  (H)