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Pentagon awards $1.1b in Iraq contracts to US, British firms

AFP, Washington
US and British firms have won two contracts worth 1.1 billion dollars to help rebuild Iraq, and Washington will award a final eight major deals to companies from countries that supported the war effort in the coming days, officials said yesterday.
"The announcement for the other primary contracts -- worth some 3.8 billion dollars -- is expected soon," said Steven Susens, a spokesman for the Baghdadbased Program Management Office (PMO) that is managing US reconstruction funds in Iraq.
The US defence department late Thursday awarded one contract with a ceiling of 500 million dollars to US-British joint venture FluorAMEC to work on Iraq's patchy electricity sector.
A second contract for public works with a ceiling of 600 million dollars was given to US partnership Washington International/Black and Veatch.
The two contracts were the biggest to date from a five-billion-dollar envelope earmarked specifically for construction projects in the war-battered country, Susens said.
On Wednesday, the Pentagon served up seven contracts worth more than 120 million dollars to US and British companies to manage the reconstruction projects in six sectors -- electricity, public works, security and justice, transportation and communication, health and education and oil.
And it had doled out a series of smaller contracts on Monday to Iraqi, Polish and United Arab Emirate firms for housing developments.
The United States has pledged 18.4 billion dollars for reconstruction in Iraq, more than a third of the 55 billion dollars the World Bank estimates will be necessary to get the country back on its feet.
But Washington infuriated many countries last year by declaring that primary rebuilding contracts would exclude war opponents such as France and Germany, while primary contractors were free to hand out work to whomever they want.
Special criteria such as technical merits and past experience was used to select the successful applicants for the latest contracts from a combined list of 14 offers, said Bruce Cole, a second PMO spokesman.
"We wanted to have the best people here," he explained.
FluorAMEC will concentrate on helping to fix Iraq's electricity network, which is characterised by daily blackouts. As of February 20, all 18 provinces had 10 hours of electricity per day with some peaking at more than 16.
"We are very pleased, it is good news for us," said Nick Welsh, a spokesman for AMEC, speaking to AFP from Britain.
The engineering and construction joint venture, 49 percent owned by AMEC and 51 percent by Fluor, will start work on the contract very soon, he said.
The water deal will focus on repairing the country's water infrastructure, which has suffered due to a combination of war damage and 13 years of international sanctions, and include improving its decrepit sewage system.