BELGRADE (Serbia), February 23 (SeeNews) – Serbia has cancelled a tender for the construction of a 110-kilometre section of a key motorway in the country’s north because none of the bidders has met tender conditions, local media reported on Tuesday.
Serbia’s Infrastructure Ministry has set the tender conditions in compliance with the by-law on public tenders, broadcaster b92 (www.b92.net) reported.
A local consortium led by road construction firm Preduzece za Puteve (PZP) has submitted the lowest bid of 9.97 billion dinars ($136 million/100 million euro), the government in Belgrade said last week.
A consortium comprising Croatian construction firm Hidroelektra Niskogradnja and Serbia's Vojput has offered to do the job for 11.55 billion dinars, while Slovenia's Primorje has bid 13.47 billion dinars.
It was not immediately clear what conditions of the tender the candidates had failed to meet.
Dusko Drazic, the spokesman for Vojvodina Put, which is part of the PZP-led consortium, said the firm would appeal the decision to cancel the tender, b92 said.
The deadline for lodging appeals would expire in eight days.
Serbia opened the tender for the construction of the motorway stretch of EU-defined Corridor X in December. Part of the 110-km section connects Serbian city of Novi Sad with Horgos, at the border with Hungary. Another part connects the Serbian town of Subotica with Kelebija. All four municipalities are located in Serbia’s northern province of Vojvodina.
Pan-European Corridor X links western Europe with Greece over land. It stretches 2,360 kilometres across eight countries, including Serbia. Two legs of the corridor cross Serbia - leg B connects the Hungarian capital Budapest with Novi Sad and Belgrade, and leg C links Nis with Pirot and, further east, with the Bulgarian capital Sofia.
(1 euro=99.3504 Serbian dinars)