"Huge government contracts combined with high technical demands, short delivery time and prestige is of great value to contractors. When a project is delayed and time becomes critically short, you start writing invoices with your fork." (Anonymous source with experience from several major contracting businesses.)
For many suppliers, The Holmenkollen project has been a lifesaver. The financial crisis hit the construction market very hard, and the ever-increasing workload at Holmenkollen was therefore more than welcome.
"Holmenkollen is a special project in the sense that it is extremely time critical and technically demanding (…) The descriptions that form the basis of the contracts have been shown to have significant weaknesses, which again has led to a large number of changes in the construction contracts", consultancy company Metier writes in its report on the project, 14 August 2009.
A project that had a price tag of 53 million, now comes to cost 1.905 billion kroner, but the final bill is still not ready. The reason is that the Holmenkollen project, which is responsible for the development, has not finished the final settlement.