Bulgaria needs 100,000 social homes, Mahmut Dereli, president of TORKAM Holding, said at the second "Black Sea Construction Site" awards on September 11 in Primorsko.
Dereli said a program that size can only work if the state, local councils and building firms team up in a public-private partnership, and he called on the Bulgarian Construction Chamber to get involved. "With so many building companies in the sector here, I believe this is fully doable in a very short time," he said. Such a project, he said, would give a boost to construction and infrastructure and help the country grow in the future.
At the same event, the holding and its Bulgarian firm LON BG EOOD picked up two awards for the Stamopoulou Lux complex in Primorsko, which took first place in the "Residential Complexes" category. Buildnix EOOD built the complex for LON BG.
The complex has 58 apartments, shops, a gym, a spa and parking. It covers about 6,000 square metres and cost $7.5m to build. Construction ran from April 2012 to May 2013 and took 376 working days, TORKAM said. The award comes more than a decade after the building was finished.
The Construction Chamber, the newspaper Stroitel and Primorsko council organised the contest, backed by the chamber's regional branches in Burgas, Varna and Sofia. Primorsko mayor Ivan Gaykov and Construction Chamber chairman Lyubomir Kachamakov welcomed guests at the evening event at Perla Lounge & RestoBar, which drew officials from national and local government along with people from the building trade and professional bodies.
The contest first ran in 2025 in Tsarevo, and the winning projects from that round were later shown at the European Parliament in Brussels. Primorsko hosted the second edition, with buildings from several Black Sea coast towns in the running.
Mahmut Dereli founded the business in 1989. TORKAM has more than 35 years in construction. The company has built around 5 million square metres and more than 30,000 homes across over 30 projects. Its finished and ongoing building work is worth about $3bn. The group has 25 companies and around 5,000 staff, working in seven countries: Turkey, Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Bulgaria and Algeria.
Besides construction, real estate and investment, the holding also works in technology and the space industry, manufacturing, foreign trade, logistics and finance. In Bulgaria it operates through LON BG, its construction arm for both local and international projects.