€55.4m tender for new cargo wharf goes to Turkish consortium

A Turkish consortium which previously had connections to Gozitan property magnate, Joseph Portelli, has won an Infrastructure Malta tender for the construction of a new cargo wharf.

The tender for the Construction of a New Cargo Facility at Ras Ħanżir Paola, between Laboratory and Fuel wharves, was awarded to Excel Sis Enerji Uretim Construction last November.

The tender, as according to the Government Gazette, will cost €55.4 million, with some of that coming out of European funds.

Excel Sis Enerji Uretim Construction is largely a Turkish consortium, which however includes Maltese investors. The Maltese side of it – which originally held 25% of the company’s shares – was initially led by Gozitan developer Joseph Portelli.

The company made waves in Malta after it won a number of the Labour government’s major road building projects, as it spent some €700 million to upgrade Malta’s road network.

Nowadays, according to records on the Malta Business Registry, Portelli is no longer a shareholder, and the local interest in the company is held by Tangent Vector Projects Limited – the sole shareholder of which is James Fenech.

Fenech was last year acquitted of breaching EU sanctions by providing two RHIB vessels to a group of alleged private military contractors during the Libyan Civil War in 2019. Fenech had insisted that he was told that the vessels were to be used to evacuate oil and gas workers.

He was acquitted because the prosecution had failed to prove that the vessels and their outboard motors were on the list of items that need government clearance before being sent to Libya.

Excel’s bid was not without obstacles : Infrastructure Malta was forced by the Public Contracts Review Board to cancel the contract that it had awarded to Excel in January 2022, after the board had found that a rival consortium – NQuay-MT, owned by Bonnici Brothers, had offered to fulfil the tender for €18 million less.

NQuay-MT was the cheapest bidder at €37.5 million, but was disqualified on the grounds that their bid was, administratively, not compliant. As the second cheapest bidder, Excel Sis won the tender with an offer of €55.4 million.

NQuay-MT’s lawyer John Gauci successfully argued to the PCRB that their exclusion from the tender was unfounded, thereby forcing Infrastructure Malta to cancel the contract and to reconsider how it awarded it. A court of appeal had overturned the board’s decision.

The tender was awarded to Excel Sis, with a contract decision notice being issued on the government’s tendering platform in November 2022.

The project itself, which spans 28,000 square metres, will see the creation of a new wharf for cargo ships, and is supposed to be completed within the next three years.

The wharf will also serve for the increased mooring of vessels of up to 300 metres in length and nine metres wide.

Other facilities in this project include connections for potable water, electricity and telecommunications. There will be systems for rainwater catchment, as well as a system of fire hydrants. The project will also include efficient lighting and electrical charging for refrigerated trailers.

It is part funded by the European Union through the EU Cohesion Fund.