Nine foreign banks have submitted bids to become the financial consultant of the Bourgas-Alexandroupolis oil pipeline project, Bulgarian-language Dnevnik daily said on July 28 2008.

The banks in questions are Calyon, Societe Generale, BNP Paribas, ING, Lazard, Citigroup, Gazprombank, RBS and Project Finance Solutions.

The bids will be reviewed in London on July 29 and 30 by the Bourgas-Alexandroupolis-BG oil pipeline project company, which is one of the shareholders in the International Project Company (IPC), the entity in charge of the pipeline’s construction and operation.

The winner is expected to be announced in August, Dnevnik said, quoting a Bourgas-Alexandroupolis-BG official who said that the overall price of the pipeline had risen to 1.5 billion euro due to the increased prices of metals.

Earlier comments set the price of the pipeline at 800 million euro.

The latter was set up with the purpose of building the pipeline between the Bulgarian Black Sea port of Bourgas and Greece’s Aegean port of Alexandroupolis.

The construction of the 280-300km pipeline is due to start in 2009 and should be completed in 12 months at most.

The agreement on the formation of the IPC was signed in December 2007. The company itself was registered in the middle of January 2008 in the Netherlands. The company will be in charge of collecting the transit fees.

As entered in the inter-governmental agreement, the three parties to the project are Russia’s Bourgas-Alexandroupolis pipeline consortium, whose participants Transneft, Rosneft and Gazprom Neft jointly own a 51 per cent stake.

Bourgas-Alexandroupolis-BG oil pipeline project company comprises state-run Bulgargaz Holding and Technoexportstroy, which holds the Bulgarian allocation (24.5 per cent), the Greek joint venture HELPE SA – THRAKI SA (23.5 per cent),  Hellenic Petroleum, and one per cent held by the Greek state. Company stakeholders also appointed managing and supervisory boards.

Russia, Bulgaria and Greece signed a memorandum for the pipeline in April 2005. The installed capacity of the pipeline is put to 35 million metric tons of oil with the option for its expansion to 50 million metric tons.