BRITISH construction firms have won infrastructure contracts worth £1 billion ($1.65 billion) including roads and drainage network besides hotel and museum projects linked to the World Cup 2022 in Qatar.
The biggest contract worth £316 million was clinched by Carillion for the latest stage of developing downtown Doha, reported the dailyrecord.uk.
Awarded in December 2011, just days after the country won the bid to host the World Cup in 2022, the contract will see the firm build a five-star Mandarin Oriental hotel, offices and apartments.
Engineering consultants Hyder Consulting last year won a £67 million contract to design a section of a £3 billion expressway in Qatar. The project has been described as the “M25 of the Middle East” by company boss Ivor Catto.
Engineering consultancy and design firm Atkins was awarded a £65 million five-year contract in 2011 to improve roads and drainage in Doha by the Qatar Public Works Authority.
Builders Balfour Beatty are shareholders in BK Gulf, who are carrying out electrical and plumbing work on the £360 million National Museum of Qatar.
Engineering consultancy Mott MacDonald is working on the new Centre of Arabic Studies. They also designed and built a 500-seater mini demonstration stadium for Qatar’s 2022 World Cup bid.
Reuters reported recently that Doha seems to have accelerated work on infrastructure projects worth roughly $210 billion that it plans over the next decade or so, many of them related to Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 soccer World Cup.
Project spending soared 32.7 per cent to QR68.4 billion ($18.7 billion) last fiscal year, compared with growth of just 1.9 per cent in the previous year.
Difficulties in planning and logistics, as well as bureaucratic obstacles, delayed project spending in the past. Qatar has now scaled down or divided into phases some big-ticket projects, such as a metro, a port and airport facilities, to reduce economic overcapacity risks.
Current expenditure rose 6.0 per cent to QR163.2 billion in 2013/14, a sharp slowdown from a 24.4 per cent jump in each of the previous two years, because of a drop in interest payments and spending on supplies and services. However, public sector wages kept rising strongly.
