NCC Loses Access to Black Sea
// Victor Yushenko considered the company’s agreement with a port as not transparent
As Kommersant predicted, agreement between state-owned Ilichevsk Sea Commercial Port (ISCP, Odessa) and Ukrainian company Ukrtranscontainer, for managing port’s container terminal, was broken. It was announced by Ukrainian President Victor Yushenko during the meeting at ISCP.
Yesterday, during his visit to Odessa, Victor Yushenko had a meeting in ISCP. There, he said: “The ministry of transportation and communication is canceling current bidding and is opening another one, which would be fairer.” Pavel Ryabinkin, Deputy Minister of Transportation and Communication told Kommersant that the necessity of new bidding was caused by non-compliance with a public procedure.
It is true that there were no selection of contenders to manage container terminal in ISCP. The terminal was given to Ukrtranscontainer (affiliate of Russian company National Container Company [NCC] ) for long term management. In exchange for investment of $500 million for terminal modernization the joint venture receive the right to collect profit for managing over 196,000 containers – approximately yearly amount of container going through the port. However, the partnership did not last. Already in August port labor unions, prosecution and new ministry of transportation official had a lot of complaints against Ukrtranscontainer.
Yesterday, NCC categorically refused to comment on the situation in Ilichevsk, while saying that the company “does not have reliable information about broken agreement. The ministry of transportation of Ukraine thinks that it is going to be chosen to conduct second bidding. The ministry officials said that new process will take couple of month and by the end of February the results should be known. Pavel Ryabinkin told Kommersant that NCC “has a good chance to win second bidding.” During the negotiations with Ukrtranscontainer we will consider the amount of investments already made and will offer a compensation for that, “Ryabinkin explained. However, according to Kommersant information, the provision of the compensation is part of the contract if one of the sides will break agreement.
Kommersant will be monitoring development of the events.
Sergey Ryzhkin; Serget Sidorenko, Odessa; Mykola Oliyarnyk, Kiev
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 14, 2005
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