NASSIF RIZKALLAH
Commercial and Contracts Manager, CWG

20 MAY 2018: As the sole Saudi partner within ANM Consortium, and a mega project master builder in its own right, Nesma & Partners enjoys a unique role, perspective and responsibility on Package 2. Proudly flying the national flag, the company’s unparalleled local knowledge, and decades-long engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) experience in the Kingdom, has been a distinctive and defining feature of ANM’s civil works group (CWG) since the design and build contract was awarded by the ADA in September 2013.

“Within CWG, we had the set up and the people on the ground in the early days so we could really hit the ground running,” recalls Nassif Rizkallah, CWG’s Commercial and Contracts Manager and the Nesma representative on ANM Consortium.

“Our profound experience in infrastructure, gained on civil and building works, as well as oil and gas, petrochemicals, power and water, across the Kingdom, along with our stakeholder relationships in Riyadh, were vital to ANM. Few other Saudi design and build contractors could match our capacity to carry out infrastructure works - and at the end of the day the Metro besides the building construction of the stations is an infrastructure project with viaducts, tunnels, at-grade sections and work to clear the corridors of services,” he adds.

If Nesma, which is part of the Jeddah-based Nesma Group conglomerate, has consistently proved to be an invaluable sounding board and expertise pool for its international CWG partners Salini Impregilo (the two companies merged during the course of the contract) and Larsen & Toubro (L&T), the Riyadh Metro has also had a profound effect on the company, and its reputation. 

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in Nesma’s workforce, which peaked at some 2,500 during Line 3 construction. The expertise and experience gained by the company’s engineers in Riyadh is highly prized in a country embarking on a raft of major infrastructure projects, and by a company already heavily involved on several schemes in Saudi Arabia.

“Our experience on the Riyadh Metro will be essential on KAAR [King Abdul Aziz Road],” Rizkallah says, referring to the Mecca project where Nesma is the managing contractor for the infrastructure of a transit system being built to connect a station on the Haramain Railway with the iconic Jabal Omar development.

“It is a balancing act,” the Nesma executive admits. “Our engineers, not least our Saudi engineers, are in high demand elsewhere. I have a responsibility to balance our skills requirements across our portfolio.”

With each partner within CWG bringing specific skills to the table, Rizkallah insists that Line 3 construction has been a team effort.