A leading Italian construction company CMC di Ravenna has been selected by the Bulgarian government to build Lot 1 of the Maritsa Highway leading up to the border with Turkey.

Cooperativa Muratori e Cementisti – or CMC di Ravenna – has offered the best price out of seven eligible offers. A total of 12 companies took part in the tender for the construction of Lot 1 of the Maritsa Highway but the Bulgarian government eliminated five of them for not meeting the requirements.

The price that CMC di Ravenna offered for the construction of the 31.4-km highway section (from the Orizovo road junction with the Trakiya Highway to the town of Dimitrovgrad) was BGN 133.1 M before the VAT. This makes EUR 2.12 M per kilometer, which is ever better than the estimate of Bulgaria's State Roads Agency's of EUR 2.47 M per kilometer.

Bulgaria's Regional Development Minister Rosen Plevneliev has commented that each time the government is holding tenders for highway construction, the offers of the bidders are getting better and more professional, and that a smaller and smaller number of bidders are becoming eliminated each time.

Four other companies bidding for Lot 1 of the Maritsa Highway had offered very close prices – between BGN 138 M and BGN 140 M. One of the rejected offers belonged to the Turkish company Mapa Genghiz – which became notorious over the delays for the construction of the Lyulin Highway west of Sofia.

The 117-km-long Maritsa Highway running from the Orizovo road junction with the Trakiya Highway to the Kapitan Andreevo crossing on the Bulgarian-Turkish border is supposed to be completed in 2013, before the end of the 4-year term of the Borisov Cabinet. A total of 38 km of the highway have been completed as of the spring of 2011.

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