The project to build a Morava navigation channel to connect Belgrade and Thessaloniki is feasible, although there are some infrastructure barriers that should not be difficult to remove, a delegation of the China Gezhouba Group Corporation, a Chinese national company, said Friday.
The channel, planned to connect the flows of the Danube, Morava and Vardar Rivers with the Aegean Sea, would cut the distance ships travel from Belgrade to Thessaloniki by 1,260 kilometers.
The Chinese delegation gathered all the technical documentation for the project during their visit to Serbia over the past two weeks.
They visited a great number of institutions, enterprises, institutes and 30 sites to become assured of the good navigability of the Morava River and announced that they will submit to the Serbian government a proposal for implementation of this major project within a few weeks.
Serbia's Minister of Natural Resources, Mining and Spatial Planning Milan Bacevic told reporters after a meeting with the Chinese delegation that he is now more optimistic than a few months ago about the possibility of the project's realization.
“This project is something we should believe in and something we all should support, and it has more sense to it than some skeptics would admit,” said Bacevic.
He said that the feasibility study for the Morava channel was planned to be completed by the end of July, but the job could be done even sooner if a proposal by Chinese experts, which he did not wish to reveal, is accepted.
Bacevic stressed that the meeting did not touch on the method of financing the channel construction or whether the costs would be covered by a USD 10 billion Chinese development fund for Southeast Europe.
He said that Serbia will not go into debts over the project.
Source: tanjug.rs
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