International Construction Law Review
CORRESPONDENT REPORT: RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN SWEDISH CONSTRUCTION LAW
ROBERT DELI*
Vinge Law Firm
1. INTRODUCTION
The construction and infrastructure spending in Sweden is currently running at just over 10 per cent of national GDP, and the proportion of large, technically complex projects continues to rise. At present Sweden is home to the building of new highway and rail corridors, deep-level tunnels beneath several of the centres of its major cities, gigafactories, carbon capture and over emerging green technology facilities, and even the relocation of an entire town to make way for an expanding mining operation. The scale of this pipeline is drawing in inter alia investors and contractors at an unprecedented rate. For many of these newcomers Swedish construction law can appear unfamiliar, which in turn fuels a growing demand for practical guidance.
Unlike many continental European jurisdictions, Sweden does not possess a civil code. Private law is fragmented across a series of individual statutes. The Contracts Act supplies the basic rules on formation and invalidity of agreements, but there is no legislation that regulates construction contracts between commercial parties. Instead, the industry has long relied on a set of agreed documents, that is standard agreements prepared by the “Contracts Committee”, a body jointly constituted by the country’s principal employers’ organisations and contractors’ federations.
The current editions of those standard agreements are AB 04 for construct-only projects – functionally akin to the FIDIC Red Book – and ABT 06 for design-and-build projects – broadly comparable to the FIDIC Yellow Book. Collectively they are referred to as the “AB Standard Agreements”. Although the AB Standard Agreements dominate the Swedish market for sizeable building and civil-engineering works, parties frequently alter individual clauses to meet project-specific concerns, and no settled market practice has emerged as to which amendments are considered customary, acceptable or off-limits.1
International forms such as FIDIC or NEC appear only sporadically, if at all, in Swedish construction projects.
* Partner and Head of the construction law practice at Vinge Law Firm (email: robert.deli@vinge.se).
1 Other Swedish standard agreements exist – for example, for the supply and installation of industrial plants (ABA 99) – but they lie beyond the scope of this article.
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