FYROM annuls Negotino sale
SKOPJE (Reuters) – The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia annulled for the second time the sale of the country’s TEC Negotino thermal power plant, adding it currently had no plans to issue a new tender. «The government, at the suggestion of the tender commission, adopted a unanimous decision to annul the tender for the sale of TEC Negotino,» said government spokesman Ivica Pocevski. «At this point there will be no new tender,» he added. A four-company consortium of Canadian Hatch Acres Inc, Finance Engineering Ltd of Bulgaria, UK-based Mott MacDonald and Unit Investment of Belgium had beaten off rivals with a -61.7 million bid for the plant, in a rerun of the sell-off. But the FYROM government said the consortium had failed to produce the necessary documentation. Deputy Prime Minister Zoran Stavrevski said last week the government did not feel it had «sufficient guarantees as to which members are behind the agreement.» The authorities had already canceled a previous tender for the plant, which was won by Austrian utility EVN, saying the competition had yielded unacceptable low bids. Hatch had proposed to upgrade TEC Negotino to 850 megawatts of capacity from its current 210 megawatts, and won out over Greek-American group Sencap, a joint venture between Public Power Corporation and Contour Global. Sencap, which offered -68 million and an upgrade to 600 megawatts, filed a suit in the FYROM courts.
