Opinion article
One of the perhaps least meaningful projects of the Ministry of Transport is coming to an end – Venta Port is being dissolved quietly and without explanation. The company, established without any practical function, operated for four years, consumed considerable amounts of public funding, but never achieved its stated objectives.
The Ministry of Transport had already decided last year to suspend the company’s operations for one year – until the 1st of July – and now plans to liquidate it. Venta Port never fulfilled the role for which it was created – to take over the functions of the Ventspils Freeport – but it certainly spent a substantial amount of money.
According to available information, maintaining the company may have cost taxpayers several hundred thousand euros. The majority of these funds were spent on executive salaries. Venta Port did not develop any significant economic activity – it merely existed. Summing up data from the company’s financial reports for 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, we see that administrative costs over four years amounted to 526,287 euros. The sole board member’s salary was 178,562 euros, supervisory board members earned 149,899 euros, and operating costs totaled just 19,978 euros. The salary of the sole board member, Baiba Vīlipa – who is also Director of the Development and Financial Planning Department at the Ministry of Transport – was 44,492 euros including social insurance contributions, or 36,000 euros net.
What have Venta Port’s board and supervisory board members – Ministry of Economics department director Kaspars Lore and former acting director of Riga City Council Iveta Zalpētere – actually done to achieve its strategic goal: the management and development of Ventspils Port as infrastructure of strategic importance for national development and security? Paying themselves and on average nine other employees salaries is not how that goal is reached.
investment attraction, logistics development, real contribution to port operations – none of this materialized.
Instead, the company acted as a bureaucratic showcase, dealing with the administration of four former Freeport of Ventspils contracts with shipping agencies – essentially redirecting funds that could have been used for infrastructure development.
Have any of the Ministers of Transport – Tālis Linkaits (JKP), Jānis Vitenbergs (NA), or Kaspars Briškens (PRO) – ever inquired about what these Venta Port executives have actually done for the Ventspils Freeport?
Now that Venta Port is being dissolved, the public still has no answers – why was such a parallel structure allowed to quietly exist for four years, and will anyone ever take responsibility for it? As so often happens in Latvia – silence. No word from officials, no apology for the wasted funds. Just footprints in the sand and an empty treasury.
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