Latvia will provisionally lose EUR 17.2 million in European Union (EU) funding due to overdue railway Rail Baltica design works, according to information collected by LTV programme “Kas notiek Latvijā?”.
The programme notes that in recent years the deadlines for the development of Rail Baltica railway line projects have been extended several times – in several agreements on EU funding in the Connecting Europe facility (CEF) program, the last deadline was the 31st of December, 2024.
The Ministry of Transport has confirmed to the programme that the design of most of the Rail Baltica base track, commissioned by the Baltic joint venture RB Rail, is still incomplete, therefore Latvia has lost the CEF funding that was available but never used.
The lost money will not be available for design work, which has been continuing since the start of the year, or other project-related activities, the programme concluded.
The Ministry of Transport has confirmed to the programme that the design of most of the Rail Baltica base track, commissioned by the Baltic joint venture RB Rail, is still incomplete. Therefore Latvia has lost the CEF funding that was allocated for design work.
The ministry told the programme that precise data on lost CEF funding for the design will be available in April. However, according to preliminary estimates, the total amount listed in CEF contracts, which is no longer usable after the 31st of December, 2024, exceeds EUR 17.2 million. Of which, the largest part, or almost EUR 10.4 million, is the funding provided for in the CEF1 contract.
In total, in five CEF agreements, the amount envisaged for the design of Rail Baltica exceeded EUR 101 million, but the largest amount for the design was provided for in the CEF1 agreement concluded on the 31st of July, 2014, which was more than EUR 72 million. RB Rail is responsible for the design of the basic track in different sections of Latvia. The most or almost EUR eight million of CEF1 funding is lost for the Upeslejas-Riga-Misa section of the track.
Overall, RB Rail had absorbed 72% of CEF funding by the 31st of December of last year, compared to 94% for the European Railway Lines (EDzL).
Meanwhile, the final report of the “Rail Baltica” Parliamentary Investigation Commission lists that the design term for “Rail Baltica” in Latvia was projected to be two years, and currently it can be seen that it was erroneously estimated, as the existing Latvian building regulations and land alienation regulations do not allow for the accomplishment of the planned result for a project of this scale.
As previously reported, according to the latest information from RB Rail, the first-round of costs of Rail Baltica in the Baltic States could reach EUR 14.3 billion (EUR 5.5 billion in Latvia). However, it is possible to save up to EUR 400 million from the optimization of technical solutions. Other savings are possible as well.
The total cost of the project in the Baltics, according to the cost-benefit analysis, can reach EUR 23.8 billion. In the previous cost-benefit analysis in 2017, it was estimated that the project will cost a total of EUR 5.8 billion.