April 19 (SeeNews) - Bulgarian state-owned civil engineering company Avtomagistrali will launch the construction of a 56 km-long stretch of Hemus motorway next week, the ministry of regional development said.
This is the first part of the 134-km long section of the motorway that would link Boaza road junction, east of Sofia, to the city of Veliko Tarnovo, in central northern Bulgaria, that the company has to build, the ministry quoted Nikolay Nankov, deputy minister of regional development, as saying in a press release on Thursday.
Construction works on the 9.3 km long section of Hemus from Yablanitsa, some 80 km east of Sofia, to Boaza road junction are progressing ahead of schedule and the section will be most probably put into operation in October, Nankov added.
Earlier this month the regional development ministry said that Avtomagistrali will expand its fleet of construction machines with own funds, in order to speed up construction works on Hemus motorway.
Construction works have been assigned to Avtomagistrali without a public procurement procedure in December 2018. For this purpose, the company has been provided with 1.35 billion levs ($786 million/690 million euro) in funding by the government.
The 420-km long Hemus motorway would link Sofia to Varna, on the Black Sea coast. A total of 170 km of the motorway have already been built.
(1 euro = 1.95583 levs)