Treasury to Pay 255 Million Euro to Airport Contractor for 'Nonexistent' Passengers

Photos: Zafer Airport

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An airport that was built in 2012 under a build-operate-transfer (BOD) deal has only had four percent of the guaranteed number of outgoing passengers in eight years and the Treasury paid for the other 96 percent, according to a report by Transparency International.

The Zafer Airport was built in the western Kütahya province to "meet the transportation needs of the people in the provinces of Kütahya, Afyon and Uşak."

According to the BOD contract, the number of guaranteed passengers for 2019 was 1.2 million. The total population of the three provinces is 1.65 million.

The contractor company was given a guarantee that the airport would have seven million outgoing passengers by the end of 2019. However, it only had 300 thousand passengers in that period, barring December 2019. Therefore, the Treasury paid 39.1 million Euro to the contractor for the nonexistent passengers.

The Transparency International estimates that the IC İçtaş company will be paid 205,281,118 Euro by the end of 2044. The construction cost of the airport was 50 million Euro.

The IC İçtaş company was also a partner in the construction of the third Bosphorus bridge, the Northern Marmara Highway, Ankara-İstanbul High-Speed Train Project and the Ordu-Giresun Airport project.

During the Justice and Development Party (AKP) era, there have been numerous BOD projects that gave such guarantees to contractors, including the third bridge and the Eurasia Tunnel crossing the Bosphorus.

The number of actual cars crossed the third Bosphorus bridge since September 2016 was less than a third of the number that was guaranteed to the constructor, an opposition deputy revealed in October. (HA/VK)