The Slovak government and a consortium made up of FCC Construcción, S.A., Alpine Bau GmbH, Hochtief PPP Solutions GmbH and Western Carpathian Motorway Investors Company signed the concession agreement for a section of Motorway D1 on Friday, 22 January 2010. Motorway D1 is the main Slovak transport corridor across the country, and it links Slovakia to Austria and Ukraine. The 25-kilometre-long awarded section consists of several stretches of road running between the cities of Hricovské Podhradie and Dubná Skala, in northern Slovakia, and in the vicinity of the city of Zilina. Financing is anticipated to be closed in the next few months.

The contract includes the construction of the new 25-kilometre-long section, six kilometres of junctions, 7.6 kilometres of bridges and three tunnels having a total length of 10.6 kilometres, the foremost of which is Visnove Tunnel (a two-tube tunnel 7.5 kilometres long with a diameter of 120 m2 for each tube), worth 1,990 million euro. The contract also calls for 30 year's maintenance.

The project, which falls within the Slovak government's new Motorway Concession Programme, is the third tender after the R1 and the first section of the D1. The Slovak Ministry of Transport started up the aforesaid Plan in 2007, with the objective of modernising the country's overland routes. Motorway D1 is also included inside the TEN European Transport Network.

FCC's experience in the concession field

The FCC Group is one of the world's leaders in terms of the number of infrastructure concessions it handles, according to the prestigious publication "Public Works Financing", and it participates in major projects in Europe and America through three companies:

• FCC Construcción
• The Alpine Group
• Global Vía Infraestructuras

Through them the FCC Group is participating in a number of major transport concessions, such as Barcelona Metro Line 9, the Eix Transversal, D'Aro and Vic-Ripoll in Catalonia, the Cartagena-Vera Motorway, the Autovía del Camino (a dual carriageway, the longest section of shadow-toll road under operation in Spain), the Tramontana Motorway in Portugal, the Málaga Metro, motorways N-6 and M-50 in Ireland and toll motorway A.5 in Austria, to mention just a few.