Opinion article.
The government has decided to liquidate JSC Ventas Osta. At first glance, this may seem like a technical step – the company has simply completed its task. In reality, however, this liquidation is an open acknowledgment of just how pointless and costly an experiment this project was for Latvian taxpayers.
Ventas Osta turned out to be the government’s biggest failure in the history of Latvia’s ports. Hundreds of thousands of euros were spent on maintaining it, but there was no real development or benefit. The company resembled more of a bureaucratic feeding trough, where salaries were paid year after year with no accountability for results. No new projects, no investments, no strategic breakthroughs – only stagnation.
For years, Latvia has had no state port development program. This means that the transit and port sector – one of the country’s most strategically important industries – has effectively been left to drift. Instead of creating a vision for development and attracting investment, the Ministry of Transport over the years
maintained control over a company that functioned as a formal façade rather than a real tool of port policy.
Ventas Osta created the impression that its only purpose was to employ officials sitting in offices and maintaining the illusion of state involvement. The only beneficiaries were bureaucrats, while the losers were Latvian businesses and the economy as a whole.
Liquidation does not mean a successful conclusion – it means a diagnosis: for years, the government has allowed systemic neglect in port policy. This failure has already cost a lot, but the greatest price is yet to come – the loss of Latvia’s competitiveness on the Baltic and European scale.
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