Vice-President of the International Chess Federation Dana Reizniece-Ozola, answering a question asked by kasjauns.lv “Could Rail Baltica project potentially lead Latvia to bankruptcy?”, sharply criticised this project’s irresponsible management, especially – political.
The former politician, who represented For Latvia and Ventspils until 2018 and then Latvian Farmers Union until 2022, was involved in Rail Baltica project when she served as Latvia’s Minister of Finance (2016-2019).
“Either Rail Baltica won’t be implemented or it will lead Latvia to bankruptcy if we continue managing it they way we have been so far. Every year the value of money goes down, and in any case, with the budget planned five – ten years ago, there is no way to implement the budget for this amount of money,” Reizniece-Ozola told the portal. She said that
the project should have been put under the prime minister’s management,
but now “the head of the government reports that in reality we don’t even know how much the project costs and how we are supposed to implement it”.
The former minister explained to the portal that member states should have signed an agreement a long time ago: specifically how much each country will invest into the project and in which order it will be implemented. “If we do some specific portion, then it would be logical for its continuation to be done by Lithuania’s side. But, as far as I know, there are no answers to these questions.”
She also reminded of the problems experienced with a different “relatively small projects”
– the construction of border infrastructure on the eastern border and the planned liquefied natural gas terminal project, which Lithuania had previously implemented in Klaipeda in place of all Baltic States [in 2014 – BNN].
“You understand you’re not doing well, and then the head of the government needs to take action. If we truly don’t have the capability, then we should contract some foreign group that can implement such projects and can tell us if prices go up and whether we should review out actions or consider where we might get the funding,” Dana Reizniece-Ozola told kasjauns.lv.
Also read: There is enough money to continue Rail Baltica project
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