A Croatian consortium, made up of Konstruktor, IGH and Tehnika, has submitted the necessary guarantees for the financing of the construction of the Bar-Boljari highway in Montenegro and the works will continue at the scheduled pace, the Croatian news agency Hina learnt from the Montenegrin Ministry of Transport, Maritime and Telecommunications on Tuesday.
The Croatian consortium has thus met the deadline which the Montenegrin government set for the submission of guarantees.
If the guarantees are valid, the consortium, led by the Konstruktor company, could start the construction works on the most demanding section of the highway - Podgorica/Matesevo, said the head the Montenegrin government's Council in charge of highway construction, Zoran Radonjic.
The Council has recently decided that the guarantees submitted by the Croatian consortium did not provide for the final conclusion of financial contracts and that therefore alternative solutions should be taken into consideration.
In the second half of December, the council extended the deadline to Konstruktor for another 60 days to deliver new financial guarantees.
In order to save time, the council decided to begin preliminary negotiations with the Greek-Israeli AKTOR/HCH company, which offered the second best bid for the construction of the motorway, in the event the Croatian bidder failed to meet the deadlines.
The Croatian consortium signed the concession contract for the construction of the Bar-Boljari motorway, from the southernmost part of Montenegro to its northernmost part, in June 2009.
The motorway will be 169.2 km long. Konstruktor will cut 48 tunnels and build 107 bridges and viaducts. The longest bridge, about 5 km, will be built on Skadar Lake.
This is the biggest investment in Montenegro and Croatia's biggest export venture so far. The Montenegrin government will set aside EUR 1.74 billion of the EUR 2.77 billion deal.
Construction is set to begin in the second half of this year and be completed by the end of 2016.
