In Libya, Haftar tears up the contract with Webuild for the Highway of Peace

The ‘Highway of Peace’ in Libya risks remaining an unfulfilled dream, after the Haftar family – which controls Cyrenaica – decided to tear up the contract with Webuild. Il Foglio has learnt of the decision, which dates back to last summer and which attempts were made, as far as possible, to keep it under wraps. This brings to an end a thirteen-year saga, which began in 2013 when the contract – worth approximately one billion euros – was awarded to the consortium then led by Salini Impregilo. The project for the construction of Lot 1 involved building a 440-kilometre motorway along the Cyrenaica coastline, from al-Marj to the Egyptian border at Emsaad. Today, however, the Haftars have decided to call a halt to the project and terminate the contract. The decision is reportedly due to the excessively long delays faced by the construction site, which, in fact, has never actually got off the ground since 2013. 

Whilst Webuild claimed that the necessary safety conditions were not in place to launch such an ambitious project, the Haftar family, on the other hand, maintained that it was the Italian company that had failed to fulfil its obligations. The dispute has taken a rather tense turn, as the Libyans have also sought to enforce the performance bond, thereby demanding financial compensation from Webuild for the damages caused by the accumulated delay. The dispute subsequently went to court in Turin, where the Italian company lodged an appeal under Article 700 of the Code of Civil Procedure, seeking an urgent interim injunction. A few days ago, Webuild won the appeal and is now awaiting a final judgement, which should bring an end to the company’s troubled involvement in Libya. The dispute between Webuild and the Cyrenaican government is somewhat surprising, as Lot 1 was generally considered the least risky for security reasons. At least, that was the view compared with the other three lots into which the infrastructure project is divided, which is intended to link the Tunisian border in the west with the Egyptian border in the east. In November 2025, Todini Costruzioni Generali was awarded the contract for sub-lot 4.3 – having previously won the contract for sub-lot 4.2 as well. Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dabaiba attended the signing of the agreement in Tripoli, where he pledged full cooperation to ensure the security of the construction site in an area that is subject to daily clashes between militias. In Todini’s case, the contract is worth 700 million euros and construction is expected to begin by the end of 2026. But here too, according to information obtained by Il Foglio, the project is in the midst of a race against time because the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport in Rome still needs to release some forty million euros to get the works underway. The withdrawal from Libya of Webuild – a company in which Cassa Depositi e Prestiti is a minority shareholder – does not bode well for Italian investment in the country. Despite the media campaigns surrounding the Mattei Plan – which, according to the comparative table on the plan’s implementation status between 2024 and 2025 presented to Parliament, has never actually been implemented in Libya – Italian entrepreneurs wishing to invest in the country complain about the government’s failure to provide a central coordinating body. And so the fate of the ‘Motorway of Peace’, regarded as the flagship of the special relationship between Italy and Libya since the days of Silvio Berlusconi, remains to be seen.