Croatian construction company Institut IGH won a tender of the state-owned road management company Hrvatske Ceste (HC) to oversee the construction of the Pelješac Bridge project and its access roads.

The decision has been published in the online bulletin of public procurement notices.

The bid submitted by Institut IGH was the least expensive, at 49.4 million (€6.6 million) excluding VAT; two other bids received were from another Croatian company Lipov Gaj (at 55.66 million kuna), and a consortium comprising the German company Krebs+Kiefer and the Croatian company Geoprojekt at 52 million.

The estimated value of this job was 53.5 million kuna.

The bid made by the consortium led by Institut IGH was chosen as the most cost effective one. Lipov Gaj’s offer was rejected as irregular because the company failed to submit a bank guarantee, while the German-Croatian consortium of Krebs+Kiefer and Geoprojekt failed to prove that it has the know-how required.

The Pelješac Bridge itself will be built by the Chinese consortium China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), which offered to build it for 2.08 billion kuna, excluding VAT. The deadline for the completion of the project is 36 months.

The total value of the project has been put at €526 million, including VAT, including eligible costs of €420 million, 85 percent of which (or €357 million) will be provided by the European Union. The decision to co-finance the largest ever Croatian infrastructure project was made by the European Commission in June 2017.

The bridge will be 2.4 kilometres long and 55 metres tall and will have four lanes. It will connect the Dubrovnik-Neretva County in the south of the country with the rest of Croatia, allowing road traffic to circumvent a short coastal strip belonging to Bosnia and Herzegovina around the town of Neum.

(€1 = 7.43 kuna)