Bulgaria – Greece – Moldova – Poland – Romania – Turkey – Ukraine.
Over the years, all seven countries have featured prominently, with possibly Poland, even in Communist times, being the strongest. Projects range from the petro-chemical plant at Wloclawek, to the tractor manufacturing facility at Ursus – not forgetting the brewery complex at Lezajsk.
Although currently the Ukraine is a “no go” area, past projects have included tobacco processing machinery for Philip Morris International to Simferopol, a coal washing plant to Kharkiv etc.
Moving on to Bulgaria, there was the cling film production line from Biggleswade to Plovdiv, the soft drink production line to Sofia, amongst many others. Most interesting was perhaps the urgent consignment to Georgia, where the trailer caught the ferry across the Black Sea from Varna in Bulgaria to Batumi – the overall transit time UK/Georgia being just nine days.
It’s difficult to know where to start with Greece – other than perhaps the gas turbine shipped by sea to Piraeus, where it was transferred to local trailers for the last leg by ferry, to one of the outlying islands.
Briefly touching on Turkey, disregarding the fact that in the early days it was a transit country to Iran/Syria/Iraq, in more recent years projects have included yacht spars to Tuzla, the recovery of a BAE 146 from Samsun and urgent spares for a drilling rig at Batman, in eastern Turkey.
