Alpine Bau wins bid for Warsaw Euro 2012 stadium

German-Austrian construction group Alpine Bau has been picked to build the stadium in the Poland’s capital Warsaw which is set to host the opening match of Euro 2012, Polish authorities said Wednesday.

Sports Minister Miroslaw Drzewiecki said that Alpine Bau, which has formed a consortium with the Polish group Hydrobudowa, won the bidding to build the 55,000-seat Vistula riverside venue after coming up with a 1.25-billion-zloty (289-million-euro, 385-million-dollar) offer.

The bids of the consortium’s five rivals weighed in at between 1.29 billion and 2.23 billion zlotys, Drzewiecki said.

According to the timetable for the European football championships, the Warsaw stadium is meant to be ready by May 2011, a year ahead of the start of the tournament.

The Alpine Bau-Hydrobudowa consortium has already won the contract for two other Euro 2012 venues. It is due to construct a 44,000-seat stadium in the Baltic port city of Gdansk and upgrade one in the western city of Poznan into a 47,000-seat arena.

The price tag of the Gdansk and Poznan contracts is 184.5 million euros.

In 2007, football’s governing body UEFA sparked surprise by choosing Poland and Ukraine as the co-hosts of Euro 2012 ahead of much-fancied Italy.

Poland and Ukraine have since been dogged by concerns about their ability to meet their commitments regarding the construction of stadia.

Worries have also focused on upgrading hotels to cope with the influx of fans, plus transport infrastructure, which is sometimes left over from the communist era and has suffered years of under-investment.

But UEFA chief Michel Platini, who is visiting both nations this week, reaffirmed in Ukraine on Wednesday that the championships would go ahead as scheduled.