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B.C. Ferries has awarded a $140-million contract to a Polish shipbuilding company that was caught up in a controversy in the Republic of Estonia.

Gdansk-based Remontowa Ship Repair Yard S.A. will perform midlife upgrades on two Spirit-class vessels, according to a March 24 B.C Ferries news release.

The work will ensure that the Spirit of British Columbia and the Spirit of Vancouver Island can run on liquefied natural gas as well as diesel.

The upgrades will also result in improvements to marine-evacuation systems, fire detection and protection, the public-address system, rescue boats, washrooms, and other areas.

The shipyard is a member of the Remontowa Holding capital group, which also constructs new vessels.

Last November, Poland-based Remontowa Shipbuilding rejected suspicions by Estonian prosecutors that two former members of its management team had paid a bribe to win a tender to build ferries for the Port of Tallinn.

The company's spokesperson, Maria Bninska, told Baltic News Service that an Ernst & Young audit had "found no materials that would corroborate the suspicion".

The Estonian Prosecutor General's Office filed suspicions and two members of the management board of state-owned Port of Tallinn were held in custody, according to a report last year on the Baltic Course website. The story was recently broken in B.C. by blogger Norm Farrell.

According to B.C. Ferries, the Remontowa Ship Repair Yard works on 200 ships per year, making it one of the busiest facilities of its kind in Europe.

"The shipyard has a strong record for delivering the required engineering and production capabilities for complex large scale conversions of projects on schedule," B.C. Ferries stated in its news release. "The company is well experienced and proven with LNG fuelled ships. All of these elements factored heavily into the decision of contract award."

B.C. Ferries vice president of engineering Mark Wilson noted that in the last fiscal year, the Crown-owned company spent $118 million on diesel fuel. The two Spirit-class ships accounted for 16 percent of that, or nearly $19 million.