Judges Awards Panama Canal Contractor Sum Over Building Materials, Services
Dispute settlement judges awarded the contractor in the Panama Canal expansion project more than $230 million in a fight over the quality of building materials and services, the contractor consortium Grupo Unidos por el Canal (GUPC) said on Jan. 1. The ruling also extends the GUPC-Panama Canal Authority (ACP) contract for six months, said GUPC, which includes companies based in Spain, Italy, Belgium and Panama, in an emailed statement. GUPC has not commented.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
The judges sided with the contract consortium in its claims that ACP provided poor quality basalt then it committed to, and delayed approval of the concrete mixture that GUPC provided. The $234 million is roughly 50-58 percent of the GUPC request. “The ACP delayed the approval of the mixture that caused a delay of seven to nine months in the work schedule of the project and considerable damages to the contractor,” said GUPC. “Both cases have a considerable impact on the construction of the work considering that 2/3 of project costs (approximately $2.31 billion of total $3.3 billion) consist in civil works, which means that are costs associated with the manufacture and concrete placement in the new locks.”
The expansion project is nearing completion, and the enlarged canal is due to start operations in early 2016. The last set of locks for the new gates arrived in mid-December. A contract dispute slowed and stopped construction on the project in early 2014, but work has resumed since without significant controversy (see 14031711).