SNC-Lavalin evacuates employees out of Libya

On Monday, Leslie Quinton, a vice president with SNC-Lavalin of Montreal, said that the company was close to successfully evacuating nearly all its employees from Libya, which is in the middle of violent civil strife.

“We anticipate that all remaining employees who wish to be evacuated should be transferred within the next 48 hours, if all continues to go well,” said Quinton in an e-mail. “We cannot give more details about how man or where they are now.”

SNC-Lavalin is heavily involved in engineering projects in Libya, including the Great Man Made River. That project is a 4,000-kilometre pipeline carrying water north across the desert (see CCE June-July 2010), click here.

The company also won a contract in 2008 to construct airport in Benghazi, and is designing and building a prison in Tripoli.

The United Nations and Canada imposed sanctions on Libya and Colonel Ghadafi’s family on February 28 following the regime’s violent suppression of demonstrators and opponents.

Quinton says SNC-Lavalin is waiting for more details as to how the UN and Canadian sanctions will apply to the projects they have under way in Libya.

SNC-Lavalin also does business in many other countries in the Middle East that have recently undergone political upheavals. Those countries include Tunisia and Egypt.

In an earlier e-mail last week, Ms. Quinton also wrote:  “In the case of Algeria we are constructing infrastructure for the people, so no matter who the government is, there will always be a need for infrastructure.”

The company is announcing its quarterly earnings this week.