Croatia will have to pay at least another 120 million kuna (€16 million) from the state budget for the Dugo Selo-Krizevci railway line, because the project will not be completed by the deadline agreed with the European Commission, the Jutarnji List daily reported on Monday.

Under the co-financing agreement, the modernisation of the existing track and the construction of a new one should be completed before the end of 2023 in order for the agreed sum to be paid out in full, which, according to Jutarnji List, is unlikely to happen.

The people contacted by the daily claim that around 90 percent of the work is expected to be completed by the end of 2023, while the whole project would be finalised in 2024. In that case, Croatia would have to pay the remaining 10 percent or so of the value of the work from its own budget.

The value of the contract with a domestic consortium is 1.2 billion kuna (€160 million), and the European Commission is co-financing the project with 85 percent.

Around 70 percent of the work has been done so far, the newspaper said.

The contract for the construction of this section of the railway was signed in 2016 and should have been completed in 2020. The deadline has now been extended until 2024, which means that the work on the 38.2-kilometre long section would take as many as eight years to finish.

In that way, the completion of this section would coincide with the completion of work on the Krizevci-Koprivnica line, which started in 2020, four years after the work on the Dugo Selo-Krizevci line began, Jutarnji List said.