Meco Consortium Wins Panama Canal Contract

Telemetro Reporta - The Meco Consortium, formed by companies from Costa Rica, Spain and Mexico, won the fourth dry excavation contract for the Panama Canal, one of the largest parts of the program to expand the canal that will allow larger ships to use the waterway, according to the Panama Canal Authority (ACP). MECO bid $267.8 million dollars, or $27 million less than their closest competitor said the ACP. "Work should begin early next year and we calculate it should end in 2013," said the head of the ACP, German Alberto Zubieta, at the event were the envelopes containing the proposals were opened. The MECO Consortium consists of the companies Meco (Costa Rica), Ica (Mexico) and FCC (Spain), the ACP said. The contract for the fourth dry excavation "represents the most complex construction project after the new set of locks," said the Executive Vice President of Engineering and Program Management of the ACP, Jorge Luis Quijano. Among the other companies and groups bidding for the contract - the Brazilian company Odebrecht asked for $379.8 million dollars, the consortium ISC Panama proposed $294.9 million dollars, and the Jan de Nul-Chec group asked for $359.1 million dollars. The proposals were opened on Tuesday by the ACP, which in the next few days should award this contract in order to complete the expansion of the Canal in 2014, in time for the centennial of the opening of the waterway. The winning group will have to remove 27 million cubic meters of earth and rock to open a channel of just over six kilometers near the Pacific entrance of the canal. The expansion project, which will have a total cost of about $5.25 billion dollars, would allow for the passage of much larger ships through the Panama Canal, which already sees about 5% of all world trade. Meco is an established Costa Rican company specializing in earth moving, road building, and the construction of tourism infrastructure, which has worked throughout Central America since 1992.