Until recently, the executive director of the company Valgo Montenegro, which was hired to implement the environmental remediation project of the area of the former Adriatic shipyard Bijela, Rajko Uskokovic confirmed to "Vijesta" that in mid-July, that company handed over a total of 4.900 tons of grit from the former Tivat Arsenal to the company MM Sistem from Nikšić, free of charge.
In the spring of 2019, the company Adriatic Marinas-Porto Montenegro made a special business arrangement with Valgo Montenegro, according to which in Bijelo, where the French company had started the extensive work of removing tens of thousands of cubic meters of grit from ship blasting and other waste from decades of ship repair activities, 3.500 cubic meters of old grit from Porto Montenegro, and over 2.500 cubic meters of soil mixed with grit.
At that time, it was announced that the grit left over from the former Tivat military shipyard Arsenal, on the site of which the Porto Montenegro marina is being built, would be exported via Valgo by ships from Bijela abroad to the same places where that French company was supposed to send grit from the former Adriatic shipyards. However, some of the grit from Porto Montenegro has appeared in Nikšić these days, scattered on part of private and property owned by the Municipality, that is, the Railway Infrastructure of Montenegro.
Because of this, part of the citizens of Nikšić protested and announced that radical measures would be taken if that material is not removed as soon as possible...
That the grit that was unloaded at Straševina and below Trebjesa was former waste from Porto Montenegro, from the former Arsenal, which was deposited in Bijela, was revealed a few days ago at a meeting held by the President of the Municipality of Nikšić Marko Kovacevic organized with representatives of local residents, as well as with representatives of competent institutions - the Ministry of Ecology, the Directorate for Inspection Affairs and the Environmental Protection Agency, announced the representative of the Ministry of Ecology Ivan Stanisic. He added that it is a non-hazardous material.
CETI certificate
Uskoković, who has recently been in front of the Montenegrin Government in the position of Deputy Executive Director of Air Traffic Control of Serbia and Montenegro SMATSA, confirmed to "Vijesta" that the company he once managed less than two months ago, ceded about 4.900 tons of grit from Porto Montenegro to a company from Nikšić without compensation. MM System. Uskoković emphasized that it is a non-hazardous material, the status of which was confirmed by the analyzes of competent institutions and CETI certificates, which is why, as he said, this material can be used without any problems as a raw material when performing various construction works, primarily in the construction of roads road.
"Precisely because it is a non-hazardous and not a dangerous material, for the quantities of grit that we took from Porto Montenegro, there was no economic interest of our partners from abroad to take it over, as they did with all the other grit from Bijela that had the status hazardous material, and the purification of which must then be paid for. Therefore, we looked for an alternative and found it in the offer of the company MM System from Nikšić, which presented us with all the licenses and other paperwork that confirms that it is authorized to deal with that business. We handed over a total of 4.900 tons of grit from Arsenal to them free of charge and they took it out of Bijela in their own trucks with proper security during transport and took it to their officially registered landfill in Nikšić. As far as I am aware, in the meantime they have already sold the largest part of that material as construction raw material to the company Putevi", said Uskoković, adding that there is complete documentation about everything in Valgo Montenegro, including the vagrancy lists from Bijela, where each was weighed before leaving for Nikšić. from a truck with a load of grit leaving the former shipyard.
Uskoković did not want to go into the details of how the smaller amount of grit they handed over to MM System ended up on private or state land in Straševina and below Trebjesa, because, as he said, Valgo Montenegro was not involved in that. He only said that he had heard that MM System allegedly stored some "5-6 tons of grit there so that at the request of a certain Radojicic filled the holes with that material and filled the road to his property".
In Porto Montenegro, in 2019, as it was once reported by the "News" from the Directorate for Inspection Affairs, there were 3.590 cubic meters of waste (used) grit, and another 2.590,5 tons of soil mixed with grit. All that material is packed in the so-called jumbo bags and for a time stood at the location where the construction of the new residential-business wing of Porto Montenegro - the Boka Place complex - is now being completed.
A job worth 23 million
In the spring of 2019, that waste material was taken to Bijela by the Podgorica company "Eko reciklaža" because Porto Montenegro and Valgo concluded a special contract for the French company to export that material abroad, together with much larger amounts of waste that Valgo then began to remove from the former shipyard Bijela. In fact, in July 2018, Valgo concluded a deal worth 23 million euros with the Government of Montenegro for the thorough environmental cleaning of the site of the former Bijela shipyard.
The ecological remediation of Bijela was part of the project "Management of industrial waste and cleaning", which was implemented by the then Ministry of Ecology, Spatial Planning and Urbanism and the Ministry of Finance and Social Welfare with a loan from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development in the total value of 50 million euros. The Montenegrin Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was responsible for the implementation of the project, which took place very slowly for four years in Bijela, with many problems and even misunderstandings with the countries to which this material was exported.
"News" from the EPA, the UIP, the current leadership of Valgo Montenegro, as well as the current departmental Ministry of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Development of the North are waiting for answers to the questions we sent them regarding the way in which the expensive state remediation work was carried out in Bijela, and how is it possible that it was at the same time combined with the private business that Valgo Montenegro concluded with Porto Montenegro in the meantime.
The people of Nikšić demand removal and threaten roadblocks
Dissatisfied citizens of Nikšić, at a meeting with representatives of relevant state institutions and Mayor Marko Kovačević on August 26, emphasized that if the grit from Porto Montenegro is not exported outside Nikšić within ten days, the residents of Straševina and Kličevo will block the main road to Podgorica, near the tunnel You will. Blockades, as they pointed out, will be daily and their duration will increase day by day.
The Directorate for Inspection Affairs ordered the company MM System, which deposited waste at disputed locations, to remove it to another location within 15 days. As the second location, for which the mentioned company received a solution, is also located in Nikšić, the locals, as well as the Mayor of the Municipality, demand that the waste, which CETI found to be harmless and that it is a matter of fine-grained material, which they assume , that the grit was used, moved out of Nikšić.
Porto Montenegro: We fulfilled our obligations
The company Adriatic Marinas - Porto Montrenegro did not answer precisely how much their contract with Valga cost to solve the problem of 3.500 cubic meters of grit and 2.950 tons of soil mixed with grit, which were left behind in the former Arsenal shipyard. They did not answer whether that contract obliged Valgo to export all that material from Montenegro, or to keep it at least partially in the country.
"Regarding the used abrasive blasting material, which was temporarily stored at the former Bijela shipyard by the specialist contractor Valgo, that material has now been disposed of by Valgo and its licensed waste treatment partners, in accordance with the contract requiring such disposal to be fully in accordance with all valid regulatory requirements and with full consultation and agreement with the competent ministries and all other relevant authorities, which was subsequently confirmed to Adriatic Marinas by Valgo", the company's management told "Vijesti".
However, they did not respond to a request to comment on the fact that now, almost five years after it was taken from Tivat to Bijela, a part of the material removed in 2019 from Porto Montenegro, these days was found scattered in an unauthorized place, not in the territory of the municipality of Nikšić .
The company that is developing the Porto Montenegro elite nautical center project in Tivat did not provide a precise answer to the question why Adriatic Marinas, which was taken over by the former Arsenal in 2007, has not removed a single gram of a total of 8.330 cubic meters of grit and heavy metal-polluted sediment from the bottom of the marina. Porto Montenegro. For the removal of this polluting material in December 2005, a "Feasibility study for the management of grit for sandblasting in MTRZ "Sava Kovačević" (Arsenal) Tivat and on the interactions of new settlements and solid waste management in the region of Tivat" was prepared by the Center for Urban Water (CUW -UK) and Imperial College London.
It was in that study that the members of the then Tender Commission of the Government of Montenegro pointed out the expressed intention and predicted methods of reading this material from undersea Arsenal as a great advantage, because of which the state should accept the monetarily disappointing offer of the company PM Securities of only 3,26 million euros for the sale of the complete property of the Tivat military shipyard and its closure for the construction of a marina and apartments for the market. However, in the final contract concluded in November 2006 with Canadian billionaire Peter Munk's PM Securities as the only bidder, the Government of the then Prime Minister Milo Đukanović (DPS) did not introduce the realization of the project of the London consortium for cleaning the underwater Arsenal at all, as an official obligation of the company to which they sold that complex. Therefore, all those 8.330 cubic meters of grit and heavy metal-polluted sediment are still in the sea, under the luxury yachts that are moored in the Tivat marina.
"All the obligations that the Government of Montenegro placed before Adriatic Marinas in connection with the removal of waste that remained in the concession area of Arsenal during the establishment of this investment and regeneration project, have now been fulfilled by Adriatic Marinas and its specialized contractors," said the company. .
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