“Emergency situation for Västlänken” – NCC head alerts about billion bangs

NCC’s President and CEO Tomas Carlsson expresses his concern in a letter in which the consortium he represents, West Link Contractors, urges the Swedish Transport Administration’s new CEO Roberto Maiorana to “act urgently”.

The NCC head writes that “the time to find a solution is short” and he calls for “negotiations on a solution (…) based on actual co-operation”.

That a CEO for one of Sweden’s largest listed construction companies in this way turns directly to the Swedish Transport Administration’s director general with such a dramatic tone, is very unusual.

The eight-kilometer-long railway project, “Gothenburg Metro”, began to be planned in 2001 and the Swedish Transport Administration has for several years promised that commuter trains will be able to roll on the double tracks in December 2026. The “first sod” was taken in May 2018. three underground stations Centralen, Haga and Korsvägen.

Last week, DN wrote that the problems had accumulated, especially in the sections Haga, where the contractor is the Italian-clad consortium AGN, and at Korsvägen, which NCC is responsible for together with German Weyss & Freytag in the consortium West Link Contractors, WLC.

By protocol from Planning meetings showed that AGN had long warned that they would be four years late – not completed until August 2030 – unless a decision on a costly so-called forcing is made. In meeting minutes about Korsvägen, managers at WLC said that they are at least two years behind schedule.

The Swedish Transport Administration’s project manager Bo Larsson admitted that there are problems, but that it was too early to state now that there will actually be a delay or increase in price.

– Only when we have regulated the slow start-up with the builders and finished blasting in the mountains at the stations can we tell where we stand, calculate the end time and what it costs, Bo Larsson told DN.

He did not rule out nor that the Swedish Transport Administration must resort to legal expertise or “ultimately court” to find out who is right. Bo Larsson also said that the construction companies at both the Haga and Korsvägen stages submitted low bids when they won the contracts and had to take responsibility for them.

– If they want to invoke changes, they must demonstrate and describe the consequences, said project manager Larsson.

NCC chief Tomas Carlsson’s letter to the Swedish Transport Administration’s director general is dated two days after DN’s article about the risk of up to four years’ delays. There, the NCC chief states that the project “already today is two and a half years late on the critical line”.

But he claims at the same time that the delay for the more than three kilometers of the Korsvägen tunnel from Landala to Almedal “is expected to increase in the future by many years” where the “final delay risks being significantly greater than the times reported in the media”.

It is mentioned that of the rock tunnel works that according to the plan today would be completed “only 40 percent are completed”.

The allocated budget for this part of the Western Link has already been broken, writes the NCC head, “and is expected to increase by many billions”.

He places the responsibility for things going wrong mainly on the Swedish Transport Administration for “late and incomplete data and construction documents”, but also points to the environmental judgment from 2020 that stopped noisy night work.

It is claimed in the letter that the work at Korsvägen will soon have to stand still “due to late deliveries and lack of quality in the documents for which the Swedish Transport Administration is responsible”.

NCC’s CEO goes so far as to describe the information they received during the procurement “was substandard”. He also says that, four years after the agreement was written, “a significant part of the construction documents is still missing”.

At Korsvägen, next to the Swedish Exhibition Center and Liseberg, one of Västlänken’s stations will be buried. But, according to the NCC head, now this whole sub-project is “endangered” because the “basic structural conditions” have not been delivered.

The NCC chief claims that for several years they have “tried to agree on a new end time” and that they still want to find a solution to complete the work – but make it clear that it requires the Swedish Transport Administration to pay more.

NCC is also a construction partner in the Centralen stage – where the work is going well. With reference to this, the company writes that it now “does not recognize this behavior”, it is worried that “the Swedish Transport Administration does not seem to want to feel what the situation actually looks like”.

NCC’s Tomas Carlsson says towards the end of the letter that they have chosen to hire lawyers to prepare claims that could lead to a lawsuit “and a future protracted dispute in court”.

NCC’s press service says that Tomas Carlsson does not want to answer DN’s questions regarding the letter.

DN has asked the Swedish Transport Administration’s director general Roberto Maiorana, who took over the assignment on 1 March, to comment on the NCC chief’s letter. His press manager Bengt Olsson says:

– We have a hard time commenting on a letter like this. We will of course have a discussion with the contractors, among them NCC, and it is certainly a complex project in an urban environment. But we can not go out and conduct negotiations via the media. So we take care of the question.

The letter makes a number of substantive allegations, such as late construction documents. Are they incorrect?

– All that is going on now is negotiations, we can not just bounce our opinion. Then it will only be more difficult to reach the goal, no matter what the goal.