Estimated price of works on Railway station in Novi Sad, which she published New economy, shows that their total value on the building with exterior decoration was originally estimated at around three million euros. The question arises as to how the price rose to 16 million euros in the meantime, as he said recently arrested former minister Goran Vesić.
At the time when the contract was signed with China on the financing of the entire railway project, the estimate for the railway station did not even exist, writes Filip Rudić.
So, first the contract was concluded for a single amount, and only then was the preliminary estimate made for the works at the station, and in the end that estimate was also exceeded, and that by several times.
"A total of 16 million euros were invested in this building alone," said the then Minister of Construction, Goran Vesić, in July of this year, when part of the Novi Sad Railway Station building was put into operation.
Vesić added that a total of 65 million euros were invested in the works.
Four months later
Four months later, the station canopy collapsed, killing 15 people, while two are still fighting for their lives. Vesić resigned from his ministerial position, and was then arrested, although he would later claim that he voluntarily responded to the call of the police.
The new economy published a document from the CIP Transportation Institute, which shows that the plan was to load the canopy with steel and heavy glass, but it also shows the estimate for all the work.
Estimates and estimate of works make a detailed list of all works and materials necessary for a construction project, i.e. an estimate of the price of that material and the execution of works.
According to this preliminary estimate from the Conceptual Project, the total value of the reconstruction and adaptation of the station building with external decoration should have been 365.934.532,18 million dinars (about three million euros) including VAT.
Nemanja Nenadić from the Transparency Serbia organization says that the document published by Nova Ekonomija "sheds new and important light not only on the issue of the price paid for the works on the Novi Sad railway site - but also the way in which the representatives of our state negotiate the price of works on infrastructure projects with for which there is no tender".
"The total price of such projects becomes known to the public usually only at the moment when the Parliament confirms the loan from which the project is financed, because contracts, as a rule, are not published", said Nenadić.
How is the price calculated?
The commercial contract on the modernization and reconstruction of the Hungarian-Serbian railway connection for the Novi Sad - Subotica - state border section was signed on May 28, 2018 by the Government of Serbia, the public enterprise Infrastruktura železnica Srbije and the Chinese companies China Railway International and China Communications Construction Company (CCCC). .
This contract was obtained and published by Transparency Serbia through a request for access to information.
The preamble of the contract refers to the interstate agreement on cooperation in the field of infrastructure signed by the governments of Serbia and China in 2009.
The price of the work was then contracted at slightly more than 1,16 billion US dollars.
It is planned that the work will be financed with a loan that Serbia will take from the Chinese Bank, and the contract price is stated to be "subject to adjustments in accordance with the Contract".
The estimate that estimates that the works at the Novi Sad Railway Station will cost three million euros was made only two years later, in February 2020, as can be seen from the Conceptual Project published by New Economy.
Irrationalities
The question arises - how was the value of the entire contract determined, if only two years later was the estimate made for individual parts of the project?
Former Minister of Construction, Zorana Mihajlović, who signed the contract as a representative of the Government of Serbia, told New Economy that the Ministry "does not influence or determine prices".
She says that the construction permit was issued in 2021, that in December of the same year, the supervision was chosen on a public call, and that the project passed the revision commission of the Government of Serbia, which includes "at least 30 experts of various profiles" who are looking at the project.
"During the execution of works, you have a million things that can appear that are not in the project. That's why there are supervision and design supervision, which together with the contractor state that there is a change in the project, and therefore the value", said Mihajlović.
She adds that there are also "external factors", such as the war in Ukraine, which "made all projects more expensive", citing the Nis-Dimitrovgrad gas pipeline as an example.
Nenadić: The prices of works increased between 2020 and 2024.
Four years after signing the contract with the Chinese side and two years after the estimate, Minister Vesić revealed that the price of the works had increased to 16 million euros.
There is no doubt that the prices of construction works increased significantly between 2020, when the CIP did the assessment, and the period 2021-2024, when the works were carried out, Nemanja Nenadić assesses.
"Also, it is quite legitimate for the Chinese consortium, which contracted the works with our state, to make a profit as well." However, these data create doubts that the value of the works was significantly higher than the real one, especially at the time when the work was contracted (2018) and open the question - why and on the basis of which and whose assessments the representatives of our state concluded that they should sign the contract". he said.
Nenadić believes that all this is a consequence of the way of contracting.
"If the modernization of the railway was contracted through public procurement, the client, that is the state company Railway Infrastructure and/or the Ministry of Construction, would first have to estimate the value of the works, and then call for a tender." At that tender, it would be seen how much money the contractors would be willing to do that work for, and the most favorable offer would be chosen," said Nenadić.
A paradoxical situation
On the other hand, we have a "paradoxical situation" - that the state undertakes to pay a certain amount to a contractor who was selected without a tender, and only two years later hires another company to assess the value of the works.
"Since this CIP assessment was made in 2020, and the value of the works was specified through an annex to the contract with the contractor in 2021, the question arises whether the representatives of our country at least subsequently tried to open negotiations on the basis of these arguments that the prices are corrected downwards", says Nenadić.
All this, he says, shows that it is necessary to publish as soon as possible all the missing documents related to this work, but also to all other similar arrangements with Serbia's partners on infrastructure works, not only from China, but also from other countries.
"This is another proof that Serbia must stop the practice of contracting such works without a tender, and at the very least, if it already contracts them in that way, the representatives of our government would have to present to the deputies and citizens, on the basis of which calculations they came to conclusion that the price we will pay for these works is realistic", said Nenadić.
Source: New Economy
