The Calafat-Vidin bridge over the Danube, which will link Romania to Bulgaria, will be inaugurated next year, after clarifying the details about the company that will manage it, Bulgarian PM Boiko Borisov announced. Premier Victor Ponta and his Bulgarian counterpart yesterday crossed the Calafat-Vidin bridge, during an event also attended by Johannes Hahn, the European commissioner for Regional Policy, as the project was financed from ISPA funds.In his turn, the late completion of the Calafat-Vidin bridge is an example of petty bureaucracy and political issues blocking important projects, as the governments needed two years just to get a memorandum approved, while 2,000 years ago the Romans built a bridge in just one year, Premier Ponta mentioned, Mediafax reports.At the beginning of the Cabinet meeting held yesterday, PM Ponta said that Romania completed the construction works for the Calafat-Vidin bridge, although Bulgaria claims the contrary. According to the Bucharest government, the works belonging to the Romanian side in the project are 95 pc completed since September 2011. The same side affirms that the initial deadline was December 2010, but “following the bridge project devised by the Bulgarian side,” different from the feasibility study initially made by the designer of the Bulgarian side, it was necessary to also re-design the Romanian side of the bridge. This pushed the deadline accepted by the European Commission to September 2011 for the Romanian side, while for the Bulgarian side – initially September 2010 and extended first until February 2012, then November 2012.
