Where is the $954 Million Allocated for Construction of North-South Highway?

The $954 million allocated for construction of the 500-km North-South Road Corridor is spent and the work has stopped — only a 25 km stretch was built. Armenian representative of the NGO Forum on ADB and coordinator of the Environmental Public Alliance Silva Adamyan said this today, in conversation with Epress.am. 

According to her, highway construction was supposed to begin in 2009 and end in 2016, but construction actually began in 2012, and it turned out that, according to the contract signed between the Armenian government and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the funds provided by ADB are spent. 

Adamyan was told that in Armenia, there is no organization capable of building such a quality of road and so companies have to come from abroad. "The tender lasted about a year. I monitored the process; there was a video of this so-called tender, which [featured] 4 or 5 companies: one was Chinese, one was Spanish, another was French — there was no Armenian organization. They announced that the Spanish company won the bid." The Environmental Public Alliance began to investigate the documents of the tender and found a "piece of paper" which listed the names of the participants of the tender — nothing else, "no stamp, no date, nothing."

Adamyan said they went to Manila, the Philippines, to ADB's annual meeting, and presented these documents to the Bank, which reacted. The Control Chamber then began to look into the work of the coordination of North-South Road Corridor Program and the RA Ministry of Transport. 

"It turned out that Armenia […] was forced to pay the Asian Development Bank a fine of $300,000 for not starting the work on time. Now imagine: we have assumed a loan program of $960 million, which is bearing down on the necks of our people, and all of us together have to pay that money to ADB. We were going to build a road of strategic significance for Armenia — this is simply a life line for Armenia — […] which was supposed to come out on one end to Iran; the other end, Poti [Georgia]," she said. 

When Adamyan and others tried to find out what happened to the $960 million, they were told: "The prices have risen, and we cannot continue our work with that money." This seems ridiculous to Adamyan. "We do not believe it," she said. 

Video in Armenian only.