Bulgaria's government decided Wednesday, May 9th, to open to potential investors a project for building a new motorway between its northern border with Romania and Turkey to the southeast. "The cabinet tasked Regional Development Minister Lilyana Pavlova with initiating a procedure for the signing of a concession contract on the planning, construction and exploitation of the Ruse-Svilengrad road," a government statement said. Preliminary estimates put the price of the new 300-kilometre (186-mile) highway, which will cross Bulgaria from north to south, at 1.5 billion leva (767 million euros, $995 million). The government had said earlier that it would be unable to fund the project by itself and hinted it was counting on Qatari investors.

On a visit to Sofia last week, Qatari Foreign Minister Khaled al-Attiyah confirmed his country's interest in the motorway, highlighting Bulgaria's important potential as a transit point from the Middle East to western Europe.

A European Union member since 2007, Bulgaria is a major crossroads for transport through the Balkan peninsula but has less than 500 kilometres of motorways and is still scrambling to finish its first cross-country highway linking Sofia to the Black Sea.