The cabinet has assigned the Ministry of Transport and Communications to select new railway operators. This was announced at a briefing at the Council of Ministers by the relevant Minister Grozdan Karadjov.
„The goal of our government is to turn the sector into the backbone of public transport in the country. It has been underfunded and unreformed for decades. The deadline for the reform is by the end of the year. Private operators have a chance to make our railway attractive, sustainable and efficient”, said the minister.
He assured that „competition will not be just a fight for subsidies, but a race for better passenger service”. Karadjov emphasized that three railway licenses have been issued so far, but none of them has made any progress towards becoming a real operator of this type of service.
“That is why in the Recovery and Resilience Plan we have clearly and precisely stated that when preparing a competitive non-discriminatory procedure for awarding these services, all potential obstacles will be removed and access to the market will be guaranteed, including the division of the contract into several separate positions with a limited volume. We have divided the network and trains in the country into three regions - one, conditionally called western, which will transport and perform 75% of the activity, one northern, which is 13.5% of the activity and one southern, which is 11.2% of the activity”, explained the Minister of Transport.
The competition will be announced next week, and the deadline for submitting documents will be three months. By December 13 of this year, a bid must be selected and a contract concluded. A year later, the selected candidate will begin actual operations. The term of the contract will be 12 years. The operators will have access to the rolling stock that the state has purchased by 2009. They will be able to use it free of charge, and ownership will always and solely remain with the state in the person of MTS. All rolling stock acquired before 2009 remains with BDZ Passenger Transport.
“The employment relationships of the workers and employees are preserved. The number is also preserved, and each of the three operators will subsequently be able to carry out the relevant restructuring and optimization activities related precisely to providing higher quality and better service to the transported passengers. From January 1, 2028, according to this contract, very strict criteria are being introduced under the bonus-malus system, which means that whoever does not provide sufficiently high-quality services, corresponding to the exact criteria that we have set in the contract, will be announced with a fairly serious fine. Where there is a much higher performance of the quality of the service, we will be able to give bonuses. In this way, we will stimulate competition to give these clearly set goals for a better level of service to passengers in railway transport,” explained Karadjov.