“The railway leading to Ventspils is rusting away. This is the result of the absolute irresponsibility, ineptitude, lack of organizational talent of the management, and it is very vividly seen in the port of Riga and the port of Ventspils in particular. This is a huge annoyance, it was done by the Latvian government, by our own politicians,” said the chairman of For Latvia and Ventspils political party Aivars Lembergs in his interview to Ventas balss newspaper.
In 2019, cargo turnover at the port of Ventspils was over 20 million tons, last year – just over 10 million. There will be around eight million this year, Lembergs said in an interview. The port reform remains largely idle and there is no indication that the government will get to grips with its implementation in the near future. At this time, there are two reform plans – one is proposed by the Ministry of Transport, and the other – by the Ministry of Economics. The proposal from the Ministry of Transport has already received stern criticisms from Minister of Economics Viktors Valainis.
In his interview to BNN, V.Valainis said: “Some fifteen years ago, one could think that everything was fine in the ports and then we could sit back and judge some new forms of government and experiment with something. As Minister of Economics, I believe that we cannot afford this at the moment! The division of the ports into two administrations that are being proposed would inevitably take several years. This would mean revaluation of assets, division of property, division of loans and revision. There would be all sorts of disputes between the state and the municipality – who owns the road, who owns the berth, how we distribute port fees, cash flow issues and others.”
The plan from the Ministry of Transport provides for separating the port and its nearby infrastructure, and leave port administration to a council with two state representative and one municipal representative. The Ministry of Economics, on the other hand, proposes an alternative port management model, which differs from both the initially proposed model and the one proposed by the Ministry of Transport. The Ministry of Economics does not support the solution by the Ministry of Transport to separate the management of port territories from the special economic zone. According to the ministry, the development of port and industrial territories is inseparably linked, and their management should be performed in unison. The Ministry of Economics also proposes including business representatives in port authorities alongside state and municipal representatives.
Commenting on the previous government’s attempt to delegate Ventspils Freeport authority’s functions over to state company Ventas osta, which was founded after Aivars Lembergs and Ventspils Freeport were hit by US sanctions, V.Valainis admitted in his interview to BNN that the reassessment of assets, which needs to be performed in such cases, is an enormous bureaucratic task in its own right, and it costs a lot of money. “Such a model of governance becomes extremely heavy and the question arises – what the hell are we doing all this for? If it is possible to answer and give a clear justification for why all this is necessary, well. If this is not possible, then it is necessary to stop rushing and instead quickly make a decision on how the ports operate.”
In his interview to Ventas balss, A.Lembergs said that “however, the structure was maintained by the Ventas osta using the funds of the Freeport Administration. How many millions have been wasted there for completely unnecessary structure maintenance!”