A judge has allowed a claim by Dragados UK against the Port of Aberdeen to continue, despite the case relating to payments to a subcontractor that were not assigned a specific value.
The Spanish-owned contractor worked on the port’s £350m harbour extension project from December 2016 to June 2020, when a mutual agreement was made to end its involvement.
A new judgment from the Outer House, Court of Session, revealed that the Port of Aberdeen paid the contractor £17.3m in their settlement agreement.
The agreement meant Dragados was obliged to secure the completion of some agreed design packages, with the client agreeing to reimburse it for them.
It also allowed for Arup to carry out additional design work beyond the agreed scope, if Dragados was instructed to do so, with terms for potential reimbursement.
Arup did carry out extra work for Dragados, including verifying drawings, and claimed from Dragados for fees and costs related to its appointment being extended for the process.
Dragados also made its own claims against Arup, which, along with Arup’s claims, were resolved through a global settlement not broken down by issue.
The main contractor and subcontractor agreed a settlement and did not put a specific value on the work done by Arup following the harbour settlement agreement.
However, Dragados claims that the Port of Aberdeen owes it £1.2m plus interest for the extra work Arup carried out.
The Port of Aberdeen argued that the claim should be rejected because of a lack of value put on the payment to Arup.
Dragados said this should not be the case because the money it sought was not for damages for breach of contract or wrongdoing, but was either a claim for contractual indemnity or payment due under the contract.
It argued that all it needed to prove was that it had a liability to Arup.
In a judgment issued on 10 April, Lord Craig Sandison ruled that Dragados could continue with the portion of its claim based on the clause in the settlement agreement concerning payments due under the contract.
He said the fact that the liability to Arup was “subsumed” into a larger, undifferentiated settlement was “of no consequence, so long as the court can determine their value” under the contract’s payment or indemnity provisions.
That part of the case will now proceed, while discussions will be held to determine whether Dragados’ pleadings need to be amended to focus more precisely on that clause.
However, the judge dismissed the portion of the claim based on a separate indemnity clause in the settlement.
He said that provision could only be invoked if the port had instructed Dragados to operate Arup’s appointment for additional design work—something the port explicitly declined to do both before and after the relevant work was carried out.
As a result, that part of the claim was deemed “irrelevant”.