Two decades since Bosnia and Herzegovina undertook to build the route of Corridor 5c and become part of the Pan-European Corridor, the citizens have only received 126 kilometers of highway and promises that the south and north of our country will be connected by certain deadlines. Lately, instead of celebrations and the opening of new subdivisions, there have been increasingly loud allegations of affairs and crime during construction. Work on the Vranduk – Ponirak section, which should have been completed a long time ago, was also recently suspended.
As the Federation of FBiH Highways stated, by looking at the contractor’s program of works and the fact that the works are not being carried out on 50 percent of the contracted route, it was necessary to avoid unnecessarily high downtime costs and to temporarily suspend the works. While the suspension of works lasts, the investor undertook to make a detailed analysis, as they say, of the contractual position, taking into account all temporarily paid amounts, contractual documents as well as the new main project that is under construction, and to inform the public in more detail as soon as they have the results of the analysis.
This section has been built since 2019 and funds of about 76.5 million have been secured from the OPEC fund. However, according to all currently available data, both that and the funds from the additional debt have been largely spent, and the stock has not been completed. Accusations of criminal acts have also arrived on top of all this, and because of these allegations, the investigative authorities will also have their work cut out for them.
The route of the future Vranduk – Ponirak highway has been under construction for the past three years, and was originally planned to be completed in August 2021. Later, based on an addendum to the contract, it will be extended to September 2022, but even then it was clear that it would not be possible to achieve it.
“These two sections Vranduk – Ponirak and Ponirak – Vraca (Zenica tunnel) will break the deadlines in a year or a year and a half”, said in May 2022 Ahmed Mushija, representative of the investor JP Autoceste FBiH.
They asked the Federation Highway for additional deadlines from the financiers, however, it was confirmed that the problems are of a much larger nature after the works on this section were recently suspended.
“By the decision of the Administration of PE Highway FBiH dated July 20, 2023, works on the construction site of the Vranduk – Ponirak section were temporarily suspended due to the indicated need for harmonization of project documentation and an additional analysis of the construction costs of the Vranduk – Ponirak highway section, especially in the part related to deviations of the contracted works”, announced the JP Autoceste FBiH.
The value of the construction contract was originally 76.5 million euros, and an additional debt of 25 million euros was subsequently approved. That the construction costs were enormously increased and that approximately 94% of the funds were used for only half of the section was also determined during the review of the Autoceste operations for the year 2022.
“The costs of this section as of December 31, 2022 for the realization of the project amounted to EUR 73,804,435, and approx. 2.5 kilometers of the total 5.3 kilometers were completed. Changes are being made to projects due to inadequate initial design, which requires additional responsibilities, and which results in escalating costs and breaking construction deadlines,” states, among other things, the report of the Office for the Audit of FBiH Institutions.
The auditors also determined that the value of the contract for supervision, for which the consortium of the Slovenian DRI and Sarajevo’s Divel was responsible for that section, increased from 2.4 million to three million. From Divel, whose name is also associated with the name of the former director of highways Elmedin Voloder, when asked about the reasons for the increase in the agreed price, they could not speak about the reasons for the increase in the contracted price due to contracted business relationships:
“On our part, we can only state that we consider it extremely incorrect to tie the affairs of our Consortium only to the mandate of the former director of JP Autocesta FBiH, Mr. Voloder, who sold his ownership stake in this company before assuming that position, which we believe you are familiar with.”
The governing Coalition of the Three also warned against shady activities during the construction of the highway, with an emphasis on the Vranduk-Ponirak case.
“For the project of about 80 million euros, 98,280,000 euros of additional follow-up work was announced, follow-up work 150 percent more than the basic cost price. I have never seen a more arrogant crime,” said Elmedin Konaković, President of People and Justice.
Conducting an investigation that would have to determine whether there were criminal acts is the job of the HNK Prosecutor’s Office, which formed the case on this case.
“According to the prosecutor’s request, the Sarajevo Federal Police Administration was asked to undertake certain investigative actions within their competence and to carry out checks of the allegations from the report, as well as an analysis of the submitted documentation and other operational and investigative actions, all with the aim of establishing the correct factual situation and collecting material evidence evidence”, said the HNK Prosecutor’s Office.
Due to contractual business relations with investors, contractors cannot talk about details, but journalists who dealt with this topic came to shocking knowledge regarding the construction of the Vranduk – Ponirak section.
“Individual stocks have been deliberately redesigned to make them significantly higher than the project predicts. The contractors are Azvirt and Hering, it is interesting that both companies are participants in the latest affair called the Počitelj Bridge, where the bridge cracked,” says Amil Dučić, a journalist from the Fokus.ba portal.
Instead of new and functional kilometers of highway, we got new affairs and doubts about the legality of construction. The competent institutions, as well as the new management of Autoceste, have the task of settling the accounts and bringing the decades-long work to an end by connecting the south and north of our country with a modern highway.
The tentative deadline for connecting the Sarajevo-Zenica highway route with the border with Croatia in the north is 2025. But the question is whether that deadline is realistic. This is certainly influenced by the current situation with the suspension of works in the Vrandu basin, Federalna reports.