Airport operator Basel Aero, a subsidiary of billionaire Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element, will begin accepting bids on Sept. 6 to design Krasnodar’s Pashkovsky airport in the first step on its transformation into a major aviation hub.
The winner will get a contract for 30 million rubles ($910,000), Basel Aero said in its call for applicants, Vedomosti reported.
The plan to build in southern Russia calls for investment of up to 9 billion rubles through 2043, and basically entails the creation of an entire city, centered around the airport, a source in Basel Aero said.
The project is a joint venture between Basel Aero, Singapore’s Changi and Sberbank, the likeliest source of financing for the plan.
The joint company wants to develop the area between two existing runways, acquire more land and eventually build a third runway to replace one of the existing ones.
Scheduled for completion in 2017, the airport will be designed to serve up to 21 million passengers per year, more than eight times the number of people who flew through the Krasnodar airport last year.
A source at the joint company said the bidders were likely to be consortiums of Russian and foreign companies such as Grimshaw, Lufthansa Consulting or France-based Egis, which confirmed it would send a bid.
The Basel Aero project intensifies the struggle between Deripaska’s Krasnodar airport and fellow oligarch Victor Vekselberg’s Rostov-on-Don.
