Romania's mini-motorway built to shame a nation

[NANO]

An entrepreneur has built a one-metre-long stretch of motorway in north-eastern Romania to protest about his country's poor highway infrastructure.

Fed up with the sparse motorway network in his home region of Moldavia, Stefan Mandachi, a 33-year-old who owns a chain of fast-food restaurants, privately commissioned the tiny motorway at a personal cost of £3,800 (€4,400; $5,000). The campaign lasted for weeks with the aim of causing a stir, and it came to a climax on Friday. Romania has one of the shortest motorway networks in the European Union, with just 806km (500 miles) throughout the whole country. This despite having a land mass almost equal to that of the UK.Sitting in the hotel he owns, just a few kilometres from the new road, Mr Mandachi explained his thinking. "We want to unify the po[CENSORED]tion, we have an ideal - to have motorways," he told. His motorway, situated on a plot of land he owns next to a busy main road, was symbolically built in Suceava, a city in a part of the country that has no stretches of motorway at all.