Tenders invited for RB ship repair facilities, writes
Terry Hutson
PORTNET HAS repudiated rights claims from the Rowdock consortium regarding a proposed super dry dock at the port of Richards Bay, saying instead that it intends inviting other interested parties to discuss proposals for a ship repair industry in the port.
This comes as a complete reversal of a long established plan of building a dry dock capable of handling ships of up to 350 000 DWT, which was originally placed on the table by Rowdock in 1994.
The Rowdock consortium is claiming certain intellectual rights to any ship repair development at the port, whereas Portnet says the option agreement with Rowdock as the preferred bidder expired on 30 September 1999, leaving it free to look elsewhere. Rowdock's bid, which was placed at that time, had not been accepted and Portnet now intends inviting expressions of interest from consultants to assist it with a new tender process.
Legal advisers within Transnet say that Portnet will not advertise specifically for a dry dock but would instead leave it to the bidders to propose viable options.
Several local ship repair experts have, from the very beginning in 1994, questioned the viability of building a giant dry dock at Richards Bay, mainly on the grounds that it would never generate sufficient income to offset the high costs of building the dock and repair quay. In the mid-1990s the cost was estimated at more than R1,2 billion.
One of the bids that is now likely to be received from Durban and Richards Bay-based Dormac is to provide one or even two large floating docks at the port instead of a dry dock.
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