Czechs Invites Tenders For $7 Bln Environment Clean-Up CZECH REPUBLIC: April 11, 2008 PRAGUE - The Czech government will invite firms to tender for a contract to repair environmental damage worth 114 billion crowns (US$7.18 billion), the finance ministry said on Thursday. The government has pledged to fix damage, such as that caused by oil and chemicals leaks by state companies under the former communist regime, when selling those businesses to new owners. It now wants to shift that obligation to whoever wins the contract, thus avoiding the risk that the state could be taken to arbitration. The new set-up is expected to stabilise budget costs. "We expect offered costs to be lower than the value of the remaining environmental damage," Tomas Uvira, chief of asset management at the finance ministry, told a news conference. The aim is to repair the environmental damage by 2015 but payments to the winner of the tender would be made over 20 years, with the state ready to pay up to 5.7 billion crowns a year. Payments would be covered from privatisation revenues and dividend income from the state-controlled power firm CEZ. The ministry expects major European players such as Veolia Environnement to participate in the tender. No timetable was revealed for the tender but the ministry said the competition would have two rounds with price as the only decisive factor in the second one. The state has removed only a small portion of environmental damage in recent years. Their original value was estimated at 170 billion crowns. (Reporting by Petra Vodstrcilova; writing by Martin Dokoupil; editing by David Christian-Edwards) REUTERS NEWS SERVICE