The Bangladeshi government has postponed the closing bid for a large-scale project funded by Japan's official development assistance in the wake of the terrorist attack on a restaurant in Dhaka earlier this month that left 20 hostages, including seven Japanese, dead, sources said Thursday.
The closing bid for the project that includes building state-of-the-art coal-fired power plants had been scheduled for late July, but the government determined that safety measures for Japanese companies bidding for the work need to be reinforced, the sources said.
The project is expected to cost about ¥700 billion (about $6.7 billion), and 80 percent of the amount is to be funded by the Japanese government's yen loans. It would be the biggest ODA project yet for Bangladesh.