Defence ministry rejects sanctions against Fegda over military road

Lithuania’s Ministry of National Defence will not sanction road construction company Fegda over defects on a road to the Rūdninkai military training ground, but has ordered an internal review of the officials who oversaw the contract, LRT reported.

The Public Procurement Office instructed the ministry’s Infrastructure Management Agency in late August to consider holding Fegda accountable and adding it to the list of unreliable suppliers. The office said the company missed deadlines to fix defects and failed to identify their causes, while contractual penalties were not imposed. Those penalties amounted to 0.02% of the contract value, which was 5.33 million euros excluding VAT, for each day of delay.

A special commission appointed by the defence minister found no grounds to sanction the company. The ministry said Fegda had notified the client and the road’s user that repair work was complete within the required deadlines, but the parties did not sign defect-removal certificates because they disputed how the repairs should be carried out. Inspections of the work took place 40 or more days after repairs had been completed, the ministry said.

The ministry said the process was prolonged because the agency and the Lithuanian military did not promptly commission an expert assessment to determine how the defects should be fixed. The dispute was resolved on June 5, when Fegda agreed to re-lay the entire road’s concrete surface at its own expense by the end of January 2027 and address other requirements raised by the military. The work is expected to cost about 4 million euros.

Defence Minister Robertas Kaunas said the deadline would not be extended and that the ministry would consider adding Fegda to the unreliable suppliers list if it failed to complete the work properly.

The ministry said the Infrastructure Management Agency had been directed to conduct an internal review into the responsibility of those who supervised the contract, following the Public Procurement Office’s findings that the agency had not properly overseen construction and later repairs.