Land litigations are postponing the building of the second bridge linking Romania to Bulgaria over the Danube river at Vidin-Calafat, Bulgarian newspaper Dnevnik reports, quoted by Romanian monitoring agency Rador.

Bulgarian Transportation Ministry expects to receive an independent study by November 5 regarding the value of some 20 plots of land and is negotiating with their owners to purchase them, deputy Transports minister Vesela Gospodinova announced.

According to Dnevnik, the problems related to the expropriation process postponed the signing of the contract for the construction of connected infrastructure by tho months.

That is because the Vidin city hall, which should have offered land for Transport Ministry procurement, separated some of the plots and solde some 30,000 square meters of the land necessary for the construction of the bridge, Dnevnik says.


Works at the 1971 meters-long bridge should start by March 2008 and finished in 2010. The total value of the bridge amounts to 225.8 million euro.