The consortium formed by Odebrecht and Colombia's Valorcon was the only bidder in the final stage of a tender process carried out by Colombia's Magdalena regional river corporation Cormagdalena for the Magdalena River Waterway PPP Project.

Cormagdalena will now evaluate the bid and will announce in mid August whether the project is finally awarded to the Odebrecht-led team.

Two other teams had been shortlisted for the project but finally did not submit final binding offers:

• Navega Magdalena: Acciona, Jan de Nul, Consultores del Desarrollo and Castro Tcherass.

• Coderma: Iridium Colombia Desarrollo de Infraestructura SAS (ACS), Van Oord Colombia SAS, RM Holding SAS and Juneau Business Inc.

In April 2013, nine consortia had submitted qualification documents for the project. Later, in late May Cormagdalena announced that three consortia had been shortlisted. 

The selected consortium will carry out maintenance and upgrades to improve the waterway's navigability. The estimated investment for the project is around $1.3 billion.

Once the project is complete, the river would have a depth of seven feet and could transport convoys of up to 7,200 tons (the equivalent of about 234 trucks). It will be the main project of transportation infrastructure in the Colombia's history.

The model of the contract is a public-private partnership for the design, construction, finance, operation and maintenance of the project.

The Magdalena waterway totals about 1,540km. Most of its transportation activity is concentrated within a 900km section, between Puerto Salgar in Cundinamarca department and Barranquilla port in Atlantico department.

The river basin has a 27.3Mha surface area, equivalent to 24% of the country's continental territory.