UK taxpayers to foot the bill over botched Magnox decommissioning tender process.
A £6.1bn deal to clean up Britain’s redundant fleet of Magnox nuclear reactors has been pulled after the Government bungled how the work was awarded.
The taxpayer will also pay almost £100m in compensation to companies who bid for Magnox work but failed to get it, after the High Court ruled contracts had been botched.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) announced on Monday the early termination of the deal awarded to the Cavendish Fluor Partnership (CFP), in which a FTSE 100 engineer has a 65pc stake.
The news sent Babcock’s shares down more than 3pc, but announcing that the contract would now end after five years instead of 14, Energy Secretary Greg Clark made it clear the decision has “no reflection” on CFP’s work.
Instead, the deal to decommission the 12 Magnox sites, along with a reactor at Sellafield, was pulled because the way it was awarded was mishandled by bureaucrats.
In 2012 the NDA ran a tender process for the work, awarding it to CFP two years later. However, when the partnership started work to assess exactly what needed to be done, the Government said it “became clear to the NDA” that there was “a significant mismatch between the work specified… and the work that actually needs to be done”.
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