Bengaluru — A consortium including Carillion won a £1.4bn contract on Monday to help build Britain’s High Speed 2 (HS2) railway. The infrastructure contract offers respite to the builder as it grapples with the aftermath of a write-down battering. The company’s shares rose 21% to 67.89p in midday trading, after Carillion said it and partners Kier Group and Eiffage had won two lots of work for HS2, set to link London with the north of England from 2026. The win follows a torrid week for Carillion, which lost 70% of its value after parting ways with CE Richard Howson and booking an £845m writedown due to problematic constructions. Carillion linked the difficulty partly to public partnership construction contracts with governments where builders shoulder the risk of cost overruns. In response, it promised to abandon such contracts and focus on growing infrastructure areas such as telecoms and rail. "We expect the UK government’s objective of generating economic growth through investing...
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