Warsaw (Puls Biznesu) – The companies which lost money on earlier contracts because they evaluated them too low, are now increasing their demands.
In the past, the construction companies in Poland used to fight for contracts with price dumping. It often turned out that the final price was many times higher than planned before. E.g. the A2 Konin-Strykow motorway was supposed to cost EUR 325m but was EUR 80m more expensive. Krzysztof Koziol, Budimex spokesman, while commenting the company’s quarterly results stressed that they were poor because of losses generated at A2 construction. He evaluated the company’s compensation demands at PLN 60m (EUR 15.5m). Budimex is going to fight for the money in the court of arbitrage. So does Strabag. The state-owned road authorities believe that the companies should blame themselves.
Today, the construction companies demand higher and higher prices. They say that after the troubles over A2 they do not want to make the same mistake again. They say that they have to raise prices in order to invest in their development. This means even bigger troubles for the road administration. “PB” has recently described the troubles with Sosnica-Belk highway: three out of four offers were much higher than expected EUR 239m. Greece JP Avax was the only company to offer EUR 213.5m while the other offers were EUR 50-90m higher.
(PLN 1 = EUR 0.258)