A consortium of the local Tepe and Akfen with Germany's Flughafen Wien has initialled a $307 million build-operate-transfer (BOT) contract to build a new external lines terminal at Istanbul's Ataturk International Airport. The client is the state airports authority DHMI within the Transport & Communications Ministry.

Pending approval from the council of state, construction can start by mid-July, a senior DHMI official says. Tepe has a 75 per cent share in the consortium, Akfen 20 per cent and Flughafen the remainder.

The venture submitted the bid with the shortest operating time of three years, eight months and 20 days out of 10 tenders opened on 16 May. This is the fourth round of bidding in the protracted history of the project; tenders were last cancelled after a third round in 1995 (MEED 15:12:95).

This time, bidders were asked to submit construction periods and operating times necessary to obtain BOT earnings of

$160 million. The client also specified a common construction period of 30 months.

The new terminal will double the airport's annual capacity for handling foreign passengers to 10 million. With a total covered area of about 120,000 square metres, the project will also include a reserve energy centre, a heating centre, a waste incineration plant, a water treatment plant, a reservoir, additional aircraft parking aprons, 18 passenger bridges, and parking for 7,000 cars.