The bridge across the Kerch Strait has risen in price six times
Moscow - Simferopol, June 6 (Navigator, Mikhail Stamm) - The project of a bridge across the Kerch Strait, which should connect Kuban with Crimea by 2018, has risen six times in price compared to initial estimates and is approaching absolute world records for the cost of such projects. It will cost RUB 283 billion.
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The state will allocate 70% of the money for the construction of the bridge. The rest of the money is planned to be borrowed, but there is no final financing scheme yet: Western banks have stopped giving low-interest loans to Russian companies, and the rate of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation is prohibitively high. The project will take at least 20 years to pay off, but for this the bridge will have to be made toll not only for trucks and buses, but also for all cars, writes Kommersant.
The estimated cost of the project is about 283,2 billion rubles. ($8 billion at current exchange rates). Chairman of the Board of Avtodor Sergei Kelbakh said at a meeting of the interdepartmental working group on the construction of a transport crossing across the Kerch Strait that the most acceptable option is a two-level road-railway bridge. It is planned to be built in three and a half years.
It is not yet clear who will use such gigantic money. A month ago they wrote that the private China International Fund could take part in the financing, and the state-owned China Railway Construction Corporation could undertake construction. On May 22, the head of the Ministry of Transport, Maxim Sokolov, said that “a number of companies from China and South Korea have shown interest” in the project.
The project will pay off at least until 2038. And this is still the cheapest project - the rest would cost more, the publication reports. The very high price of the project may be justified: the geological and hydrological situation in the Kerch Strait is considered one of the worst, which was one of the reasons why the bridge was not built under the USSR.
The Kerch Strait Bridge has become six times more expensive.