The contract with the constructor of the Aranyosgyéres-Maroskece section of the A3 motorway in Northern Transylvania in Romania has been terminated, Transport Minister Catalin Drolla announced on his community page. The head of the ministry said he had run out of patience with the Romanian consortium led by the Straco Group, which has built less than forty percent of the track division in five years and has only advanced by one percent in the past five months.
A bankruptcy lawsuit was filed against the track construction company and the company did not pay its subcontractors. Drolla added that representatives of the Romanian state had long been looking for a solution to avoid terminating the contract, but the cup was now full.
The minister also considered that the contract with the Straco Group called for drawing conclusions on the issue of cheap, suspicious offers. The consortium won the right to build a 15.7-kilometer strip, estimated at 620 million lei (about 46.5 billion forint), by offering 280 million lei (about 21 billion forint).
In its MTI report, it states that in 2003 the Romanian state decided to build the North Transylvania (A3) highway 415 kilometers from Bursa to Brasov. The government excluded the construction of the track from the scope of the Public Procurement Act, citing national security reasons, and entrusted the US company, Bechtel, with the task without bidding. Until 2013, when he terminated his contract with Bechtell, only the 52 km segment was handed over after Cluj-Napoca. Later, the Romanian state also obtained European Union funding for the northern Transylvania route and sought builders for shorter sections of the highway. Currently, about 98 kilometers of the track can be used. The Aranyosgyéres – Maroskece section will connect two built sections of the motorway between Cluj-Napoca and Targu-Morris.
