LISBON: Portuguese construction company Lena, from Leiria, has managed to win a contract to build 50,000 homes, as part of an enormous project to construct a new city in Venezuela. The lucrative contract involves building a city in Ocumare, 60km from Caracas, with the project part of government plans in the country to provide 2 million of the poorest people with homes by 2017.
There is a massive lack of homes in Venezuela and although falling, the level of poverty is still very high. The “chavist” government of President Maduro has given the green light to the project with Lena helping by building thousands of flats. Lena has organised a system that enables it to build the flats almost completely independently of the enormous price fluctuations on the market that have been seen in Venezuela in recent years.
It has set up two factories that produce the wall panels. All the other materials that are shipped to Caracas come from Portugal.
