Inquiry Commission into Canopy Collapse: Essential Documentation Missing, and the Published One Reveals Irregularity

Source: N1 Belgrade

Link to original article: https://n1info.rs/vesti/anketna-komisija-za-pad-nadstresnice-nedostaje-sustinska-dokumentacija-a-ona-objavljena-otkriva-javasluk

Vladimir Obradović, a professor at the Faculty of Organizational Sciences and a member of the Inquiry Commission for the Investigation of Responsibility for the Collapse of the Canopy in Novi Sad, stated that, based on the commission’s analysis so far, it can be concluded that the complete documentation on the reconstruction of the Novi Sad Railway Station has not been published, and that essential documentation is missing.

At the press conference of the Inquiry Commission, another member of the Commission and professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, Ognjen Radonjić, presented the organizational chart of the railway modernization project with a special emphasis on the organizational chart of the reconstruction of the Railway Station in Novi Sad. The Commission, he added, developed this chart based on available documents.

This chart, he explained, is necessary to determine the type and degree of responsibility. The Commission, he added, sees three categories of responsibility.

“The first category is the responsibility of the profession, that is, engineers, and we see that an investigation is being carried out in that part. It remains to be seen whether those who have been prosecuted are really responsible or whether all those responsible have been prosecuted,” said Radonjić.

The second type of responsibility, he added, relates to financial crime, corruption, or inflated prices, then tax evasion and money laundering. “Here we see that there is no investigation, and there is no documentation that would be useful for this type of investigation.”

“And the third type of responsibility relates to those who called for the use of the railway station, although it was possible to know at that moment that the railway station had the status of a construction site,” he pointed out.

He also expressed doubts about the good intentions of the government in publishing the documentation, since over 20,000 documents with over half a million pages were published on three different websites.

“That documentation is not systematized. A large part of it relates to the entire railway modernization project, which means that it is largely irrelevant, and I think that the goal is actually to bury the public in order to slow down the conclusions that are drawn based on that documentation, and on the other hand, we largely doubt the authenticity of a large number of documents,” said Radonjić.

“It started from the tail, instead of the head”

According to Professor Radonjić, in order for the issue of liability to be analyzed effectively and comprehensively, relevant documentation is also necessary. “So far, the public emphasis has been on the documentation held by lower-level subcontractors, so we started from the tail instead of the head,” he pointed out.

What can be seen, he adds, is that the main contractor for the reconstruction of the Railway Station was the CRIC CCCC consortium and that this consortium, as the main contractor, was responsible for everything from the execution of the works, documentation, insurance, security, etc.

“So, the entire responsibility for the implementation of the project was on this consortium. The consortium hired the company CCCECC, the Balkan branch, as a subcontractor, a company based in China and which further hired its domestic subcontractors. Here we singled out GAT and Starting…Starting hired its suppliers and subcontractors. What we noticed is that any documentation kept by this subcontractor CCCECC is missing, which raises the question of whether this subcontractor performed any work at the railway station, if so, to what extent, or whether it acted as an intermediary in whole or in a significant part, which, of course, only drives up prices,” said the professor.

What is new in all of this, Radonjić points out, is that two more subcontractors are involved in the reconstruction of the Novi Sad railway station. One is CRCC11, and the other is CRCEBG.

“We do not have any documentation about these subcontractors hired by this consortium. Therefore, we cannot draw any conclusions regarding these two subcontractors, and the fourth subcontractor is the designer CRDC. Also, all of these are companies based in China,” pointed out Professor Radonjić.

“There is no plan, no report” – what documents are missing?

“There is neither a plan nor a report, and that is the shortest way we can illustrate the documentation that was submitted,” says Professor Vladimir Obradović.

He explains that for the purposes of the scheme presented today, they analyzed a huge number of documents and placed a special focus on the commercial contract that actually regulates the relations between the state of Serbia and the contractor.

“Just by analyzing that one commercial contract, we came up with a list of 21 documents or groups of documents that will be presented and that will also be placed on the website of the Inquiry Commission. So, these are documents that are definitely missing, and the contract stipulates that they must exist, that is, that some party in that system must create them. However, as we have heard, the publication of that documentation started from the tail, not from the head,” said Obradović.

He singled out several of the most important groups of documents that should have existed:

1. The dynamic project plan is missing. This is defined by the contract and 28 days from the start of work, the contractor was obliged to submit a dynamic project plan to the investor, also with the prescribed elements. There should be a list of all activities that need to be done, a plan of all resources, including human and material, procurement plans and all other important elements, how the contractor plans to implement the project in accordance with the contract. The state of Serbia had to approve that plan and then work based on it.

That plan actually represents the basis for all future changes, of which there were many, but they are not recorded anywhere, because if you do not have an initial plan, you cannot have changes to the plan.

2. The thing that is missing, and it is very precisely defined by the contract, are the contractor’s monthly reports. So, based on this defined plan, the contractor was contractually obligated to submit a report every month, which also had a prescribed structure, had to list all the work that had been done, had to contain photographs of that work, had to contain adequate guarantees, tests, certificates, what was needed, and to provide a comparative overview of what was planned to be done and what was done…

“So, the lack of a plan and report is shocking to say the least and it’s like driving a car in an unknown direction without a map, without instruments, without knowing how much fuel you have in the tank, so a completely absurd situation. Smaller projects of several thousand or tens of thousands of euros are done with much more precise plans and reports than here, if we have a billion-euro project. So the question arises as to how the state paid the contractor, if it didn’t have a report and what the contractor did”, emphasized Obradović.

3. The entire set of documentation regarding the selection of all subcontractors is missing. The diagram shows only part of the network because it only refers to the Novi Sad station. “Imagine for the entire project. Where is the documentation on the selection of subcontractors? The contract defines that contractors are selected in a public competition, that this competition must be announced, that subcontractors are then selected based on certain rules and verified, or approved by the investor. There is also no trace of this, where these competitions were announced, what were the criteria for the application, who applied, how these applications were evaluated, how subcontractors were selected and where are the approvals from the state, that these subcontractors are in accordance with the contract,” Obradović emphasized.

He predicted that there is particular documentation for some subcontractors, but systematically this documentation does not exist.

“On the other hand, there is evidence in the documents, in the files, that there was friendly negotiation and friendly contracting. Friendly contracting is the enemy of competition and public contracting. So that is also scandalous for a project of this size,” the professor emphasized.

4. The documentation on the application and approval for entry of persons to the construction site is also missing, and it is directly related to safety, says Obradović.

“We must say that at the time of opening and at the time of the accident, the Novi Sad station was still a construction site… This was noted by the construction inspection on the same day, or the day after the accident, which issued a decision to close the construction site. So, since it still had the status of a construction site at that time, everyone who entered that construction site, by contract and by law, must report their arrival, so that someone can approve their arrival. Where is that documentation and why is it missing?” he asked.

And in the published documentation, there is a misunderstanding – extremely worrying

“So, based on all that we have seen and will deliver, we can freely state that the complete documentation has not been published, not even close to being published, because the essential one is missing. In the documentation that has been published, we can, on the other hand, see some other things, such as, for example, general negligence in these works, inconsistency in the application of regulations and inconsistency in the documentation that exists, which may indicate systemic places for corruption in this project,” Obradović stated.

He emphasizes that this is truly worrying, because when one can read from these reports that inadequate materials were used, that concrete was used that was not approved and not in accordance with the technical instructions.

“To give an order to stop this, and after the supervision left, the contractor continued to work, that is worrying. Because we do not know whether these people now, those who were working against the instructions, are currently pouring piles for the National Stadium or on some other public facility, and that really brings great concern,” Obradović stated.

Almost every report or a large number of reports also state that occupational safety rules are not being followed, that protective equipment is not being worn, and that there are people on the construction site whose identity and why are unknown.

The President asked for the work to be accelerated – additional cost of 65 million dollars

“What is particularly interesting, and that is why we have established it here, is the appearance of the President of the Republic and people associated with him in official documents. So, you have an official record from the Chinese consortium that the President requested that the works be accelerated, that they informed that it could not be done so ad hoc and that it would cost an additional $65 million to complete the project earlier, to complete it by the end of 2024. So, be careful here, we are not talking about doing additional work or doing something more or something better. No, just to make it faster – we will provide 30 kindergartens,” Obradović said.

“We will provide 30 kindergartens while, on the other hand, children are going to schools in Serbia in a squatting position or facades are falling on their heads, just so that the President’s wish can be fulfilled, who hierarchically has no authority to act anywhere here – the state of Serbia, the citizens of Serbia provided $65 million more,” he emphasized.

The missing documentation, according to him, is “the modus operandi of how infrastructure projects in Serbia are done.”

“What is particularly worrying is that these companies, under the same or similar name or in the context of related legal entities, are engaged in most other public projects in Serbia. So this modus operandi is being transferred to other large projects such as EXPO or Belgrade on the Water,” says Obradović.

Every day that the railway station is closed costs us at least 35,000 euros.

Ognjen Radonjić also presented the calculation made by the economic and financial subcommittee.

“We have calculated the additional costs of not using the Novi Sad Railway Station. The state has not calculated the entire damage or we do not know that it has announced the damage due to the collapse of the canopy. So it would have to include how much it would cost to rebuild the canopy. However, we suspect that even that may not be enough, that it will be necessary to demolish the entire railway station and build a new one, but that is just our assumption,” he added.
Radonjić also states that they could not calculate some other costs because they did not have the data.

“But what we could calculate is how much additional time citizens lose, because they have to travel from Novi Sad to Petrovaradin railway station, how much public transport costs to transport citizens there, and what are the approximate losses of Serbia Trains due to the non-use of this railway station. Our estimate is very conservative, we would say the minimum possible, and it is 35.3 thousand euros per day, or 4.2 million euros for the past 118 days, which is about a million euros more than the CIP calculation to reconstruct the entire railway station. And what is important to highlight is that this meter continues to count and that each new day costs us an additional 35 thousand euros.”