The contractor will complete the construction of the outbound route

The mayor's office will not change Transstroy as the contractor for the reconstruction of Shchelkovskoye Highway, despite the fact that the completion of the project is already a year overdue. They hope to complete the construction as soon as possible in order to avoid losses from exchange rate volatility, and finding a new contractor would take time.

Photo: Sergey Bobylev, Kommersant / buy photo

“The reconstruction of Shchelkovskoye Highway will be completed before the end of this year,” said relevant Deputy Mayor of Moscow Marat Khusnullin at a press conference on issues of the capital’s construction complex. “The difficulties in meeting the project deadlines are due to the fact that we encountered a problematic counterparty in the person of the Transstroy company,” he clarified. According to Marat Khusnullin, Shchelkovskoye Highway is the only outbound highway whose construction has encountered difficulties. Nevertheless, the mayor's office is not going to break the contract with Transstroy. “If we stop this cooperation, new competitive procedures will be needed, which will take time. And the city is now trying to complete the projects it has started ahead of schedule in order to minimize possible risks from currency fluctuations,” explained Mr. Khusnullin.

Why is the mayor’s office dissatisfied with the reconstruction of Shchelkovskoye Highway?

Initially, work on Shchelkovskoye Highway was supposed to be completed by February 2014. Transstroy, which previously belonged to businessman Oleg Deripaska (in December 2014, he lost his share to classmate Yegor Andreev), received this contract by winning a city government tender in July 2012. With an initial cost of 10.45 billion rubles. the company offered a price of 9.42 billion rubles. For this money, Transstroy must reconstruct a 13.5 km section of the highway from the Garden Ring to the Moscow Ring Road. The work includes widening the road to three or four lanes, building ramps, interchanges at the intersection of Shchelkovskoye Highway and 9th Parkovaya Street, and constructing and repairing several underground passages.

The deadline for completing the work was postponed twice. Officials first filed claims back in November 2013, three months before the expected completion of construction, claiming that Transstroy had completed only a third of the work and the city was considering changing the contractor. In January of this year, the mayor's office went to court to recover 1.6 billion rubles from Transstroy. due to violation of contractual obligations on the project. Transstroy itself then explained that they were continuing to reconstruct the highway, with the estimated completion date of the work being the second quarter of 2015. According to a company representative, the problems arose due to the untimely demolition of buildings and the release of the construction site, which should have been provided by the customer. As a result, changes had to be made to the project for the reconstruction of utilities and the pedestrian crossing project, which complicated the entire project and delayed its implementation.

Oleg Deripaska opened his bridges

Shchelkovskoye Highway is the second major infrastructure construction project that has caused dissatisfaction with the mayor's office. The first turned out to be a change in the contractor for the construction of the Alabyano-Baltic tunnel, estimated at 70 billion rubles, which was NPO Kosmos. Due to financial problems, Kosmos was unable to implement the project (commission was scheduled for 2010), and the contract with it was terminated. In October 2014, a tender for the completion of the tunnel worth 4.3 billion rubles. won "Mosinzhproekt".

Ekaterina Gerashchenko

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Transstroy will remain on Shchelkovskoe Highway