Albania’s government has awarded a concession to the country’s leading cement producer Fushe Kruje to build a $130m production line that woud enable the plant to cease its imports of clinker. The cabinet’s press office said in a statement the government decided late on Friday to award the build-own-operate (BOO) concession for the private investment project of the Fushe Kruje cement factory in western Albania.
The factory would build a dry process cement line with 1.3Mta annual capacity under the BOO project financed jointly by the cement producer itself and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank’s private sector arm IFC, Greece’s Alpha Bank and the OPEC Fund for Reconstruction and Development.
The Fushe Kruje cement plant was established in September 2000 through the acquisition of the assets of Cement Manufacturing Enterprise of Fushe Kruje, which then was the second largest cement factory in Albania, by a consortium led by Lebanese cement group Seament. Seament, which also runs the Elbasan cement plant in central Albania, controls 99 per cent of the Fushe Kruje plant. The plant employed 300 at the end of 2003.
