Authorities Grumble About Foreign Builders

Turkmen government officials have turned on the foreign companies that do much of the large-scale construction work in the country, saying their work is often shoddy, unsafe and late.



At an April 15 cabinet meeting, deputy prime minister Nazarguly Shagulyev said some of these companies breach building regulations, use poor-quality materials and miss deadlines for no good reason. He ascribed most of these failings to the Turkish companies which dominate the construction industry.



After Shagulyev’s speech, President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov stood up and said he was “not going to put up this situation any longer”, and would shortly take “appropriate measures”.



Turkish firms are currently engaged in construction projects as divers as an airport for the Caspian city of Turkmenbashi, an Olympic-standard watersports centre, a power station in the capital Ashgabat, factories, apartment blocks and shopping malls.



This is not the time Berdymuhammedov, elected in February 2007, has turned his attention to these companies. Last year, he ordered a review of a number of joint projects involving Turkish firms, which was said to have revealed massively inflated cost estimates.



More criticism followed when the same review found that the plasterwork on the newly-built National Library had crumbled after the first rainfall, and that prestige multi-storey apartment blocks had lifts that did not work, malfunctioning ventilation systems, badly-installed plumbing and a poor finish.



People who live in these apartment blocks confirmed they had problems.



“A week after I moved into the flat, the tiles on the kitchen and bathroom wall started cracking,” said a resident of one of the new multi-storey blocks in Ashgabat.



Another owner of a new flat said he used to hear windows cracking in his block at night, and then found that the whole building was shifting because it had unstable foundations laid over underground irrigation systems.



“It turned out that the construction company didn’t have a document from the seismologists permitting them to build houses on this land,” he said.



NBCentralAsia commentators in Ashgabat agreed that there were numerous problems as foreign companies chased lucrative contracts.



According to one commentator in the northern Dashoguz region, some foreign construction companies cut corners and maximised profits by hiring unqualified local labour and using cheap materials.



Another analyst made the point that many of the problems could be traced back to the Turkmen government, which handed out contracts in closed tenders in which neither the bidders nor the winners were made public.



“The public finds out who the winner was only after the president subsequently issues a decree authorising some ministry to sign a construction contract worth tens of million of dollars with a particular… company,” he said.



A Turkmen government insider noted that there was no oversight of these foreign contracts since construction officials were barred from seeing project documents and visiting the building sites concerned.



“The worst thing is when buildings are approved for use, as it’s possible to get the inspection documents signed off by bribing high-placed officials,” said the source.



Observers say the government needs to show it is serious about improving the way these projects are handled, by rooting out corrupt civil servants, carrying out an audit of existing contracts, and checking documentation to ensure that buildings conform to regulations.



Once this is done, said a non-government activist in Ashgabat, the authorities should retain only those companies with a proven record of building to a high standard.



(NBCentralAsia is an IWPR-funded project to create a multilingual news analysis and comment service for Central Asia, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of political observers across the region. The project ran from August 2006 to September 2007, covering all five regional states. With new funding, the service is resuming, covering only Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan for the moment.)