The minister doesn't want any more delays in the transfer process.

Carolina Gonçalves*
Reporter from Agência Brasil

Brasilia - The Minister of National Integration, Fernando Bezerra Coelho, said today (14) that the works on the transposition of the São Francisco River will not be delayed again due to suspicions of non-compliance in five of the 14 sections of the basin integration project. After a meeting of more than an hour with the Minister of the Environment, Izabella Teixeira, at the end of the morning, Fernando Bezerra explained that the companies responsible for the sections still have time to explain what was being done in those locations of the work.

The diversion of the São Francisco River is one of the government's priorities and should have been completed by the end of last year. These delays in the schedule were cited as one of the reasons for the revisions to the project's budget. The project, which aims to distribute water to nearly 12 million people in 390 municipalities in the Northeast of the country, was initially estimated to cost almost R$ 4 billion. Today, the estimated value exceeds R$ 8 billion.

With the companies' explanations, the government and the courts will assess what punishments should be applied or whether adjustments can be made to allow the works to continue, a possibility that was not ruled out by the minister. If the companies do not complete the contract, in whole or in part, Law 8.666/93 provides for penalties such as warnings, fines, temporary suspension from participating in bidding processes, and a ban on entering into contracts with the public administration for up to two years.

The most serious situation is the issuance of a declaration that deems the company ineligible to participate in bidding processes or enter into other contracts with the Public Authorities, which would be equivalent to a judgment of unreliability that would only cease to be valid when all the reasons for the interruption of the works were resolved.

The Ministry of National Integration is still investigating the suspicions. Inconsistencies were found in measurements in the contracts for works and services in sections 1, 2, 9, 10, and 11. According to representatives of the agency, the processes relating to four of these lots, all initiated in May 2012, are in the final stages. One of them has already been completed and forwarded for analysis by the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office and the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU).

Evidence of irregularities was identified during a survey conducted by the supervising companies, which analyzed measurements of work from previous years and presented corrections to these actions in September 2011.