The auditor general’s office has blamed the contractor for the termination of the Paphos-Polis road, saying that state authorities were not responsible despite having added to the delay, it emerged on Friday.

The audit service had warned the department of public works that the contractor intended to terminate the contract, according to a report on Philenews.

Greek company Aktor (formerly Intrakat), which undertook the project in 2022, sought over €35 million in damages after the contract’s termination by the public works department in November last year.

The department of public works had been castigated by the contracted company for errors, including in wording during the tendering process, which it claimed resulted in unsuitable materials being procured, as well as for taking months to respond to queries.

Other failings aired by various stakeholders were the department’s lack of supervisory capacity and incorrect designation of quarries for the securing of materials, resulting in them needing to be brought from much further away, as well as environmental concerns over further quarrying in already depleted areas.

Addressing statements by the company’s CEO, Transport Minister Alexis Vafeades has previously said detailed answers would be provided in coordination with the legal service when the matter went to court.

According to the audit service’s completed assessment, the works never showed substantial progress and it had been considered extremely doubtful whether the project would be completed even by May 2025, the new completion date arbitrarily set in a revised work schedule submitted by Aktor in September 2023.

In a memorandum submitted to a parliamentary committee, the audit service said the project presented serious delays from the outset.

Its financial progress amounted to less than four per cent at the 47.6 per cent benchmark – close to halfway through the contracted timeframe, the project was barely four per cent complete.

This appears to contravene statements made by the public works department which allegedly did all it could to avoid the collapse of the contract, and whose director had claimed works were in fact 30-35 per cent complete when they actually stood at less than 18 per cent.

During this time Aktor was paid €14.3 million from a projected total of €86.8 million originally budgeted for the job.

Elsewhere, the Greek judiciary had intervened to prohibit the payment of guarantees to the Republic of Cyprus, another legal anomaly flagged by the audit service, which it said cast a shadow over future arrangements of this kind, made through Greek financial institutions.

The memorandum noted that the audit service had expressed its strong concerns to the public works department regarding delays and other adverse developments at the end of December 2023, and had urged an immediate resolution of the issues.

“The termination of a contract by a contracting authority results primarily from the inability of the contractor to complete the contract within the framework of the legislation on public contracts or due to the contractor being in financial difficulty and unable to finance the works,” the audit service was quoted as saying.

The service expressed the view that “no shadow should be cast over the contracting authorities which terminated contracts due to the contractor’s inability to deliver what was promised in the bid.”