Italian construction company must pay back EUR 18 mln to Romanian state

Italian construction company Salini Impregilo, which worked on the third segment of the Sibiu-Orastie highway in Transylvania, has to pay back RON 83 million (EUR 17.8 million) to the national company for road management infrastructure (CNAIR), a Romanian court has decided. The Italian company had won that sum following a partial decision of the International Arbitrage Court – ICC Paris, issued in march 2017. It then went against CNAIR and got the money through forced execution. However, CNAIR challenged the enforcement actions and won the case at the Bucharest Court of Appeal, local Economica.net reported. The whole dispute started after a 200-meter hole appeared on the Sibiu-Orastie highway, on the segment built by the Italian company. The hole appeared in 2015, less than a year after the highway segment opened for traffic. CNAIR decided to do the repairs itself and financed the work by executing the guarantees that Salini Impregillo had provided when it started working on this highway segment, totaling RON 60.48 million (EUR 13 million). The 82-kilometer highway between Sibiu and Orastie was mostly financed by the European Commission, which covered EUR 510 million of its costs. editor@romania-insider.com