April 8 (SeeNews) - Bulgarian state-owned civil engineering company Avtomagistrali is adding 20 heavy-duty vehicles and 11 road construction machines to its fleet, the regional development and public works ministry said.
The new heavy machinery will speed up the works on a section of Hemus motorway from Boaza road junction, east of Sofia, to the city of Veliko Tarnovo, for which the company has been awarded a construction contract, the ministry said in a statement over the weekend.
Avtomagistrali will fund the purchase of the equipment with own funds and not with the 1.35 billion levs ($786 million/690 million euro) provided by the state for the construction of the motorway section, the ministry stated.
The works on the construction of the 134 km section of Hemus highway were assigned to Avtomagistrali without a public procurement procedure in December 2018.
The section is part of a 430 km motorway that would link Sofia to Varna, on the Black Sea coast. A total of 170 km of the highway have already been built, and another two stretches with a total length of some 26 km are currently under construction.
(1 euro = 1.95583 levs)