Consortium wins Istanbul airport tender for 22.1 billion euros

The Cengiz-Kolin-Limak-Mapa-Kalyon Consortium, a joint venture of Turkish companies, has won a tender for a controversial third airport in Istanbul, promising to pay the government 22.1 billion euros for 25 years starting from 2017. Seventeen groups qualified to enter the tender, but only four -TAV, IC-Fraport Consortium, Cengiz-Kolin-Limak-Mapa-Kalyon Consortium and Makyol İnşaat-showed up at today's bidding session. IC-Fraport Consortium, the last competitor of the winning consortium, and TAV withdrew from the race at 22.1 billion euros, following Makyol İnşaat, which quited in an earlier phase.

From the closed envelopes, IC-Fraport had offered 20 billion euros (tax excluded) for the 25-year lease, Cengiz-Kolin-Limak-Mapa-Kalyon had given 12.7 billion euros, TAV had given 9 billion euros, while Makyol had given a moderate 4 billion euros before withdrawing from the tender.

Fifteen Turkish and two foreign companies had bought for Istanbul's third airport, which was valued at more than 7 billion euros ($9 billion) by Turkish Transport Minister Binali Yıldırım. Many of Turkey's leading companies, including Enka, Doğuş and Sabancı Holding, and two foreign companies, Malesian Khazanah Nasional Beerhad and India-based GMR Infrastructure, did not submit their bids although they bought the specification, the Anatolian News Agency reported.

In order to spark competition for the third airport, the Transportation Ministry introduced some amendments to the specifications last week. The changes made in the specifications included lifting the three-company limit for consortiums and the requirement that a dominant partner own a 51 percent share.

The tender for the build-operate-transfer project, which is to be conducted in four stages, will be for a 25-year lease, with the cooperation of the private and public sectors. The state will guarantee the amount of passengers and tariff levels for a certain amount of time.

Following the finalization of the tender approval, the first phase of construction is set to be after 42 months, in 2017, and will provide an initial capacity of 90 million passengers a year. Once all six of the planned runways are complete, the capacity is expected to increase to 150 million passengers, the world's largest in terms of the passenger capacity at full capacity. The airport is planned to provide jobs for 100,000 people, the Minister Binali Yıldırım said earlier.

A total of six runways, 16 taxiways, 165 aircraft passenger bridges at all terminals and 6,5 million square meter apron with 500 aircraft parking capacity among other facilities will be constructed.

The new airport is planned to be constructed at the Istanbul's European side between the Black Sea regions of Yeniköy and Akpınar, on an area of 7,659 hectares. Some 6,172 hectares of this area is forest land.

The Environmental Impact Assessment's (ÇED) report for the 3rd airport project in Istanbul said last April the total number of trees in the area is 2,513,341 and 657,950 of them will need to be cut indispensably while 1,855,391 of the trees will be moved to new places. However the exact number of the trees to be cut and moved will be revealed after the airport's project is completed, the Forestry Ministry told the Hürriyet Daily News.

And the tender has been taken to court by the head office of the Turkish Chamber of Environmental Engineers (ÇMO) on the grounds that the project violated the existing legislation for the environmental impact assessment (ÇED) report preparation.