Bulgaria signed a 137.4 million euro contract for the construction of a highway section near Sofia with Turkish consortium Mapa-Cengiz on August 8.

The 19km Lyulin motorway is designed to remove a bottleneck on a major European Union-defined transport corridor near the Bulgarian capital.

"I will be very glad to see the highway completed within 36 months after October 1," the head of the Government's Roads Executive Agency, Veselin Georgiev, said at the signing ceremony.

"Traffic between Sofia and Pernik sometimes reaches as much as 45 000 vehicles a day, which is huge," said Georgiev.

Mapa-Cengiz was selected in competition with four companies, two from both Greece and Turkey, he added. It had offered the second-lowest bid for the project.

The construction of the Lyulin highway will be 75 per cent financed under the EU's ISPA pre-accession programme, with the rest of the funds coming from the state budget.
The highway will have three tunnels with combined length of 1.26km and 26 bridges and viaducts. It will also mark the beginning of the planned Strouma highway that will link Bulgaria with Greece.

"We have studied the conditions on site very well, we know the route and we realise the importance of that project for Bulgaria," Vedat Cetintas, project manager at Mapa, told the same ceremony.

The European Commission is to select in September a supervisor of the project from a short-list of eight companies, made by the Roads Executive Agency, Georgiev said.
It appears that there are different opinions on the financial side of the project to build Lyulin highway.

Bulgaria will have to pay at least another 40 million euro for the construction of the Lyulin highway, because the price asked by the contract winner, Turkey's Mapa-Cengiz, is unrealistically low. This was announced by Bulgarian company Glavbolgarstroy's executive director Evgeni Marinov.

The same thing happened with Sofia Airport's new terminal and its contractor Strabag. It is a common trick to offer a very low price to win the tender and then use project weaknesses or obstacles to revise the parameters of the contract, Marinov explained. That causes losses to the state.

Glavbolgarstroy participated in the tender in a consortium with a German company.

Bulgaria will need more than two billion euro to complete four key highways in the next decade, the Government said last month.

The country's national strategy for integrated infrastructure development calls for the completion of 720km of new motorways by 2015.

The country, which aims to join the EU next year, has been delaying the completion of key highways linking the capital with its Black Sea ports, and the country with neighbouring Greece and Turkey since the late 1990s.

It is estimated now that the planned 114km highway to link Bulgaria with Turkey, called Maritsa, will cost about 361 million euro and since part of the motorway construction has been funded so far by the state budget, the Government plans to complete it with national co-funding and EU funds. Bulgaria plans to finish the Maritsa highway construction in 2009.

The highways Strouma, linking Bulgaria with Greece, and Hemus, to link the capital Sofia with the Black Sea city of Varna, will preferably be constructed through public-private partnerships.

The feasibility studies for the route of the 172km Strouma highway have almost been completed and expert estimates put the construction costs at 600 million euro by 2012.

Hemus highway also has complete project documentation and approved route and its construction is estimated at one billion euro, the statement said. Bulgaria will grant a build-and-operate concession to Italian Salini Costruttori to build the remaining 285km of the 425km highway.

The project documents for the 95km Black Sea highway, linking Varna and Bourgas, are to be completed by 2017; the project is estimated at 400 million euro.