Romania Restarts Work on Transylvanian Highway

Romania's public roads authority, CNADNR, announced on Monday that it has awarded a 701 million lei (around 159 million euro) highway construction deal to a consortium made up of Spain's Corsan SA-Corviam Construccion SA and three Romanian companies.

The deal covers the design and construction of a 60-kilometre highway stretch in the north-west of the country, ending at the town of Bors on the Romanian-Hungarian border.

The motorway stretch is part of the planned Transylvania Highway, which is supposed run for 415 kilometres Brasov in central Romania, through the north-western county of Cluj to Bors.

Work on the highway started in 2004 after a contract worth 2.2 billion euro was granted to the US company Bechtel. But construction was halted in mid-2005, when a new government started looking into contracts concluded under the previous left-wing administration.

In May 2013, after ten years of intermittent work and only 52 kilometres of the motorway completed, the centre-left government of Prime Minister Victor Ponta canceled the contract with Bechtel.

By that time, Romania had spent around 1.42 billion euro on the highway. The country still owes the company 37.2 million euro - the amount due for the work that has already been completed.

The Balkan country currently has less than 700 kilometres of completed motorway - not much for a country of its size, and far from the kind of network seen in many countries in Western Europe.

Romania opened 50 kilometres of highway last year, less than half what it achieved in 2013.

In recent years, with help from the European Union, governments have tried to improve the situation, but none of the projects that have begun has been fully finished yet.

Some had to be postponed or...