Bulgaria’s Road Infrastructure Agency has announced changes in their contract with “Mapa Cengiz”, the Turkish company constructing the Lyulin Highway.

The chair of the Road Infrastructure Agency, Bozhidar Yotov, and the project director of the Turkish company, Kemal Unluer, signed Thursday evening an annex to the contract for constructing the Lyulin Highway.

The new agreement is said to stipulate some changes in favor of Bulgaria: the highway needs to be 19km long and it needs to connect the Sofia beltway to the Struma Highway, which is not ready yet.

Another additional request in the new agreement is that if the highway is not ready by May 15, 2011, “Mapa Cengiz” will need to pay the Bulgarian state EUR 14 M of damages.

The new agreement will prevent the possibility of future arguments between the two sides.

The initial contract with “Mapa Cengiz” for construction of the Lyulin Highway was signed 4 year ago for the amount of EUR 137 M.

About 75%, or EUR 103 M of them, were supposed to come from the EU ISPA program.

“In order to receive a 100% coverage by ISPA, the highway needs to be finished and put into service not later than December 31, 2010.The contract for building supervision of the highway also needs to be finalized by then,” the Road Infrastructure Agency has explained.

The contract states that if “Mapa Cengiz” does not finish and certify the construction works by that time, it will have to pay the Bulgarian Road Infrastructure Agency 75% of the difference between the total value of the trace and the value of the finished work.

According to the new agreement, the Turkish company is also obliged to hire Bulgarian workers, which should be not less than 70% of all hired workers.

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