Kathmandu, February 26: The status of the payment which the Cooperativa Muratori e Cementisti (CMC), the former contractor of the Melamchi Water Supply Project, has to make to the subsidiary contractors and suppliers is still not decided.
The Ministry of Water Supply and Sanitation has stated that although the wages remaining to be paid to the local laborers have been finalized, the finalization of the payment to the sub-contractors and suppliers is yet to be achieved.
The Ministry has formed a technical committee to study the dues the Italian company owes on the basis of claims for payment made by the subsidiary contractors and suppliers.
Spokesperson of the Ministry, Ritesh Kumar Shakya said it will take some more time to pay the sub-contractor companies for the materials they have supplied for the project. “Verification is being done to check whether the claims made by the companies for payment of their dues are correct or not. The payment process will be forwarded once the verification is concluded,” he said.
The Italian company had not paid the workers and the sub-contractors when it left the project all of a sudden in the middle. Since then the sub-contractors and suppliers had been demanding that either the government should make CMC pay them or it itself pay their dues. They had also obstructed the project’s work calling for the payment.
The government has signed an agreement with Sino Hydro, a Chinese construction company, for the construction of the remaining works of the Project after the Italian company abruptly deserted it in December 2018.
As per the agreement, the Chinese company is required to complete the construction within 15 months since the signing of the agreement. The technical committee formed for resolving the problem related to the payment of the dues owed by the Italian company has said the problem would be sorted out within this week. It is also learned the Ministry is preparing to issue a ‘white paper’ declaring that the Melamchi Water Supply Project would be completed within July this year.
