Who will design and prepare the feasibility study for the "bridge to Crimea" (and then, obviously, build it as well)?
This is really turning into a joke. An extremely expensive joke, though. The state-owned company Avtodor has announced the results of the tender for the design and preparation of the feasibility study for a transport crossing over the Kerch Strait. As Slon had predicted, the contract to design the bridge across the Kerch Strait was won by a company controlled by Vladimir Putin’s former judo sparring partner and billionaire Arkady Rotenberg.
The winner of the tender was OJSC Giprotransmost. With the tender’s starting price set at 384 million rubles (about 384 million RUB), Giprotransmost offered only a slight reduction, to 375 million rubles. Other bidders—CJSC Institute Giprostroymost-SPB, OJSC GIPRODORNII, and CJSC Institute Stroyproekt—who had extensive experience designing facilities for the 2014 Sochi Olympics and the APEC summit in Vladivostok, were prepared to do the project for less money. For example, CJSC Institute Giprostroymost-SPB, which designed the cable-stayed bridge in St. Petersburg and the bridge across Golden Horn Bay in Vladivostok, offered to carry out the contract for just 289 million rubles. However, the decisive criterion in evaluating the bidders was whether the company had innovative solutions and technologies. Arkady Rotenberg’s company, OJSC Giprotransmost, led on this measure by providing the tender commission with a list of 77 technologies in use, 39 of which were recognized as “innovative and applicable”. http://slon.ru/fast/business/ne-mozhet-byt-kompaniya-rotenberga-sozdast-proekt-mosta-v-krym-1077323.xhtml
(In this picture, Arkady Rotenberg is no doubt laughing at the joke that his “victories” in tenders are supposedly secured through the “presence of innovative solutions.”) And this Kremlin riffraff still talks about some kind of national sovereignty. What kind of sovereignty can a country have when most of the most lucrative mega-contracts in construction go to some St. Petersburg swindler because of his “close ties to Putin”? Such a country is not sovereign; it belongs to the mafia.