Claims submitted by contractors and supervisors to Bulgaria’s National Railway Infrastructure Company (NRIC) exceed EUR 700 million, including more than EUR 256 million in indexation requests and about EUR 460 million for additional work not originally covered by contracts, Transport and Communications Minister Georgi Peev told the parliamentary committee overseeing the sector on Thursday.
Peev said there are no funds for indexation in the 2026 budget and the Council of Ministers has yet to approve a methodology regulating the process. He said NRIC’s management had been tasked with drawing up internal rules for fairly allocating available resources based on the work actually performed as soon as the government methodology is adopted.
Peev warned that if construction work is halted because of contractors’ financial difficulties, restarting the railway projects later would be extremely difficult.
Asked about Plovdiv Airport, the minister said it had been stagnant for years and relied solely on a form of state subsidy. In his view, the airport could not and should not compete with airports such as Sofia or Heathrow solely in terms of the number of passenger routes. Instead, the focus should be on the region’s economic potential through intermodality, cargo flights, maintenance, hangar construction and related business activities.
Plovdiv Airport has significant potential, but not necessarily for attracting a large number of new routes. Plovdiv is perhaps the fastest-growing city in economic terms and has strong business potential, Peev said, stressing that the airport should be viewed in terms of intermodality and activities beyond opening new routes.
He said he believed a state-owned structure could not successfully develop the airport on such a multifunctional scale and described a concession based on a public-private partnership with an experienced international operator and fresh private capital as the most suitable model. He said analyses by a law firm were being finalized, while talks were under way with international financial institutions to validate the analyses and prepare business recommendations for launching a concession procedure. He also said a railway link to the airport was planned.
Asked about the long-term vision for the Port of Varna, Peev said pre-concession analyses had been prepared by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development for the Varna-West and Varna-East terminals.
Bulgaria should tap its strategic advantage along the Middle Corridor between Europe and Asia, Peev said, noting that although Bulgaria’s ports have a better geographical location than Romania’s, the Port of Constanta currently outpaces them in scale and development. He said the aim was to avoid looking at individual terminals, or the Port of Burgas, separately and take an integrated approach instead. According to the minister, attracting an established international port operator would be the fastest way to realize the potential of Bulgaria’s seaports.
Claims Against Rail Infrastructure Company Exceed EUR 700 Mln THE NEWS FROM BULGARIA – NEWS AGENCY 2009-2025 2026-10-01 15:15:06
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