International Construction Law Review
LEGAL ASPECTS OF USING FIDIC CONTRACTS IN INTERNATIONAL CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS IN UKRAINE
Dr Svitlana Teush, PhD
Head of Real Estate and Construction, Counsel on Energy and
Infrastructure at Redcliffe Partners law firm (Ukraine)
Dr Lukas Klee, LL.M, PhD, MBA
Advisor, Lecturer, Arbitrator, Expert witness at Klee Consulting (Czech Republic)
I. INTRODUCTION
Recent years have seen Ukraine’s significant progress in reforming different sectors of its economy, including the construction industry, which has been a challenging task, given the historical context in which Ukraine has found itself. It is common knowledge that the Soviet era was the realm of state monopoly, overregulation and centralisation, and the Ukrainian construction industry embodied all of the above. During those times and the years following, practically no room was left for independent technical supervision, consultancy or project management, private ownership or funding. Absent were competition, market-based procurement, bidding price mechanisms or other components of a liberal market. The elements of this onerous approach inherited from the USSR still persist in many post-Soviet countries, including Ukraine.
Since the launch of the construction reform in Ukraine, new market instruments and practices have begun to be introduced in Ukraine. These include: certification of professionals by industry associations; liberalisation of mandatory rules; facilitation of permit and licensing procedures; reallocation of powers from centralised governmental agencies to local self-governing authorities; and sharing state control functions with non-governmental self-governance associations. The industry is digitised, and becomes ever more transparent with the gradual introduction of electronic services and online public registers (such as the register of property rights to real estate, construction permits, construction licences, land zoning documents, public procurement portal, etc). This contributed to a significant improvement in the regulatory framework, evidenced by Ukraine’s rocketing score in World Bank’s “Ease of Doing Business” over the
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