From next year, Connecting Stockholm AB will take over the operation of Stockholm's metro. Behind the company is the British firm Go-Ahead, one of the UK's most criticised transport companies, reports SVT News Stockholm.
Earlier this week, the region announced that Connecting Stockholm had won the tender to operate the metro traffic from May 2025. The company is 55 percent owned by Go-Ahead, which has previously been involved in a number of scandals in the UK.
In 2016, 60,000 train services were cancelled due to staff disputes and track damage. Two years later, new problems arose with tens of thousands of cancelled trains and severe delays affecting the entire British rail network. Go-Ahead has also been accused of tax evasion, and the problems contributed to the British government's decision to renationalise the railways.
”The business was taken from them due to incompetence in railway operations,” Oxford researcher Oliver Lewis tells SVT.
Andreas Strömberg, Head of Communications at the Traffic Administration in Region Stockholm, told SVT that they ”have carried out a suitability assessment in accordance with Swedish security law.”.
”We can't find anything that says otherwise,” he says.
The press department of Go-Ahead's majority-owned Swedish subsidiary writes in a comment to SVT that what happened in Great Britain was ”an isolated incident” that has now been ”dealt with”.
Source: TT-DI.SE
