(source: TASR)
Slovakia will save €879,000 on the first military transport aircraft C-27J Spartan due to a late delivery from an Italian producer.
The Defence Ministry has already returned part of the money (€400,000) it received from the Italians in the end of 2017 to the state coffers. This money will be used for the ministry’s expenditures on the modernisation plans in 2018, the TASR newswire reported.
“It is a result of difficult negotiations, but I’m glad that we agreed upon a significant discount from the original price for the delay,” Defence Minister Peter Gajdoš said, as quoted by the SITA newswire.
The first Spartan plane was delivered 49 days late. It landed at the military air base in Kuchyňa, in the Záhorie region, in 2017.
The second Spartan plane is expected to arrive in Slovakia sometime in the next three months. The ministry has no information regarding potential delays, SITA reported.
The purchase of the two Spartan planes dates back to 2008 when the supplier was selected in a public competition, but the agreement was signed only in 2014. Part of the contract includes five-years of logistics support, TASR wrote.
