A parliament building in Oman will be built by a Wolverhampton firm after it won a £275 million contract.
Support services and construction giant Carillion has been chosen to build the Majlis, a new parliament building in the centre of Muscat.
The prestigious deal also includes building work on an information centre, library, offices and other support facilities in the sultanate.
The work will be carried out by Carillion Alawi, the company’s Omani arm, and will be carried out over the next three years. It comes after the company built the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Oman in a six-year-long project starting in 1995.
Carillion chief executive John McDonough said: “Carillion Alawi has been delivering high-quality projects in Oman for more than 40 years.
“Carillion Alawi built the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, the largest in Oman, and is currently working on a number of major projects, including the Royal Opera House for the Royal Court Affairs and the Oman Botanic Gardens for the Diwan of the Royal Court.
“We look forward to building on the close working relationship we have established with the Royal Court Affairs to deliver this latest landmark project.”
The new parliament development will house the council of Oman, known as the Majlis Oman, the state council, or Majlis A’Dawla, and the consultation council, called the Majlis A’Shura.
Work will start immediately and will be carried out in two phases, with the Majlis Oman completed by September 2011 and the remaining works by September 2012.
The buildings are expected to be a central figure in Oman, alongside the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, which can accommodate up to 20,000 worshippers.
The mosque is built from 300,000 tonnes of Indian sandstone and has a central dome rising to a height of 50 metres above the floor.
A major feature of the mosque is the world’s largest hand-woven prayer carpet which contains, 1,700,000 knots, weighs 21 tonnes and took four years to produce.
Shares in Carillion, which has annual revenues of more than £5 billion and employs around 50,000 people, rose by two pence, to 265 pence, after the Oman deal was announced yesterday.
The company, which also has operations in Canada and the Caribbean, announced earlier this month it had received a boost from public and private sector organisations stepping up the outsourcing of functions.
Carillion produced a pre-tax profit of £53.6 million for the six months to the end of June 2008, and analysts expect a same-basis result of £179 million for the same period this year.
It has recently won new contracts with the NHS worth more than £260 million, road and rail infrastructure maintenance contracts worth £250 million and work for private sector customers valued at £175 million.
