China company’s bid of Tk 87.078 billion gets nod

padma5Padma Bridge river training work
Cabinet Purchase Committee on Wednesday approved a tender proposal of the Bridges Division to award the river training works contract of the Padma Multipurpose Bridge Project (PMBP) to Chinese contractor Sinohydro Corporation at a cost of Tk 8707.81 crore (equivalent to around US$ 1.112 billion).

A meeting of the Cabinet Committee, with Finance Minister AMA Muhith in the chair, gave the nod to the proposal of the Bridges Division under the Ministry of Road Transport and Bridges. Senior Cabinet Ministers were present at the meeting.

With the Sinohydro bid, the PMBP’s fifth contract was approved by the government among the total five contracts for civil engineering works.

Earlier, the contracts for main civil construction work was awarded to another Chinese contractor China Major Bridge Engineering Construction Company while separate contracts for approach roads at the two ends of the bridge and service area-2 were awarded to other companies.

The construction of approach roads is now in progress and already 25 percent of the work is completed while the contract was signed for main bridge construction with China Major Bridge Engineering in June this year and 15 percent advance payment was made to the contractor.

However, the PMBP’s supervision consultant is yet to be appointed, which experts believed to be a very important one.

As per contract of the River Training Works, the contractor will conduct river training in 14 km area of the Padma Bridge, in which 1.6 km lay in the north bank Mawa side and 12.40 km in the south bank (Jajira side).

The river training works include dredging and revetment comprising concrete block, rock, geobags and geotextile filter.

The contractor will execute the work in 1460 days with completion date of July 2018.

A total of three pre-qualified bidders vied for the river training job, but finally the Sinohydro was selected by the tender evaluation committee finding its offer as lowest responsive bid.

Of the two other bidders, Belgium’s Jan De Nul NV Tragel quoted the price at Tk 16,438.37 crore while South Korean Hyundai Engineering Corporation quoted Tk 12,122.16 crore.

However, these two bidders brought some allegations against Sinohydro for different reasons, but the tender evaluation committee turned down the allegations as baseless.

Finance Minister AMA Muhith also rejected the allegations against the Sinohydro.

observerbd

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