A Canadian company that 12 years ago brought accurate monitoring to the then-troubled Man-Made River project is expecting to resume its . . .[restrict]work here, after suffering a serious financial hit during the Revolution.
When Calgary-based Pure Technologies evacuated the last of their personnel from Libya in February 2011, leaving only a single deputy branch manager in Benghazi, the company predicted that it faced losses of $17.8 million, equal to 30 percent of its total revenues. In the event, annual revenues dropped only 11 percent to $43 million, thanks to contracts picked up elsewhere in the world.
Pure is currently negotiating to secure outstanding payments from the Man-Made River Authority and says its will resume work once agreement is reached on the timing of these settlements. Company President and Chief Operation Officer Jack Elliot said: “Despite the challenges relating to events in Libya last year, we are very excited about out growth projections. The political climate is stabilising and we expect to resume work there in 2012. ”
The company noted that Libya has said that it will honour all existing contracts and settle outstanding payments.
Pure were hired in 2000 to deploy their inspection technologies after a series of failures in the pre-stressed concrete piping in the MMR, much of which is four metres wide. Initially it was given three kilometres of the pipeline to monitor acoustically. From the success of this operation, the contract was expanded to cover the inspection of several hundred kilometres of the first phase of the pipeline, which included assessing the extent and rate of deterioration in the pipes. In 2007 it opened an office in Benghazi and the following year acquired Price Brothers (UK) Ltd., an engineering company that was providing pipe manufacturing support and construction supervision services on the MMR. [/restrict]
