A joint venture of Turkish companies, the Cengiz-Kolin-Limak-Mapa-Kalyon Consortium, has won a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) tender for the third airport in Istanbul, promising to pay the government 22.1 billion euros for 25 years starting from 2017.

Although seventeen groups qualified to enter the tender, only four showed up on May 3rd at the bidding session:

• TAV Airports,
• IC-Fraport Consortium,
• Cengiz-Kolin-Limak-Mapa-Kalyon Consortium and
• Makyol ?n?aat

Fifteen Turkish and two foreign companies had bought tender documents for Istanbul's third airport. The two foreign companies that did not submit final bids were Malesian Khazanah Nasional Beerhad and India-based GMR Infrastructure.

The investment in the project is valued at + €7 billion ($9 billion). The state will guarantee the amount of passengers and tariff levels for a certain amount of time.

In order to increase competition, the Government lifted the three-company limit for consortiums and the requirement that a dominant partner own a 51 % share.

The first phase of construction will last 42 months and will provide an initial capacity of 90 million passengers a year. Six runways will be completed in future phases, increasing the capacity up to 150 million passengers.