SOFIA (Bulgaria), August 15 (SeeNews) – Bulgaria intends to set up a company pooling all assets and liabilities of the abandoned Belene nuclear power plant (NPP) project and offer it for sale at the beginning of 2018, energy minister Temenuzhka Petkova said on Tuesday.
“By the end of September we must have a clear idea how to best utilize the equipment for NPP Belene,” energy minister Temenuzhka Petkova said in a press release.
You can subscribe to our M&A newsletter here
Petkova reiterated the position of the government that the potential investor should implement the project without a state guarantee or long-term power purchasing contracts.
In December 2016, NEK paid 601.6 million euro ($704.9 million) as compensation to Atomstroyexport, a subsidiary of Russia's Rosatom, for the equipment manufactured by the Russian company for the Belene project, which Bulgaria had abandoned.
The sum was awarded to Atomstroyexport by the International Court of Arbitration in Geneva, which earlier in 2016 ruled that Bulgarian power utility NEK must pay compensation to the Russian company for ditching the project for construction of the nuclear power plant.
In 2008, Bulgaria hired Atomstroyexport to build a 2,000 MW nuclear plant in Belene, on the Danube river, reviving a project that had been mothballed for nearly two decades. After the project made scant headway, Sofia finally abandoned it with a parliament decision in February 2013. The government cancelled the project a year earlier due to disagreement over its estimated cost and failure to attract a strategic investor.
($ = 0.8533 euro)