After Kosovo issued a tender for a consortium to build a highway to the Macedonian border, Macedonia has signaled it will soon do likewise.
Macedonia is expected to issue a tender for a firm to build and operate the planned new highway from Skopje to the Kosovo border.
The tender will be offered soon after the March presidential elections, the Macedonian Transport Ministry said.
The 13-kilometer stretch will come with an estimated cost of some 70 million euro. The Transport Ministry recently signed a consultancy contract with the International Finance Corporation, IFC, to prepare the tendering procedure.
“According to the government’s plans for infrastructure, the highway should be built by 2018 the latest,” the Ministry spokesperson, Dragan Simonovski, told Balkan Insight.
He said that if they failed to choose a firm to build and operate the section under concession, they would explore other options.
On the other side of the border, Kosovo is forging ahead with its part of the long-awaited motorway.
Last week, Kosovo chose the US-Turkey consortium Bechtel-Enka to build the much longer, 65-kilometre, stretch of highway running from Pristina to the Macedonian border.
The motorway should be completed within 42 months of the signing of the contract.
The consortium, which recently completed Kosovo’s first highway, from Pristina to Albania, offered to build the highway to Macedonia for 600 million euro.
The new road is expected to significantly boost trade and other relations. Kosovo is one of Macedonia’s main trading partners and is one of the few countries with which it has a trade surplus, especially in agricultural and oil products. The volume of trade between the two countries reached some 300 million euro in 2012.
The motorway will also ease communications between the large Albanian community in western Macedonia and mainly Albanian Kosovo.
http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/macedonia-kosovo-closer-to-motorway-connection
