If Estonian Climate Minister Kristen Michal proposed the idea that the company itself could borrow the missing money for the construction of Rail Baltic, then Finance Minister Mart Vyrklaev in the Uudis+ program proposed taking the company public. rus.err.ee writes about this."The amount for Estonia at the moment is 3.1 billion euros. We have already covered 1.2 billion with money both for the previous period of European funding and for the current one. In the government, we have also formulated priorities for next funding period. /…/ This also includes organizations that are part of the security system. One of them is Rail Baltic. We hope that the same amount of money that we received now will be received. We have hope and a plan for a joint one. financing in the amount of more than two billion (euros). We can talk about an amount of more than 900 million, which additionally needs to be planned and covered,” Vyrklaev said. “The 900 million euros, which according to this calculation are missing, must be at least partially planned from the state budget. At the same time, we need to look for new solutions, where to find additional money, and we could think about going public,” the minister said , adding that the company could go public. “We know that the company that plans to build a nuclear power plant in Estonia is going to attract public money – so why not do it for an infrastructure project of the century, important for the economy and security of the entire Baltic region. This is an important project, I think that there might be interest in him,” Vyrklaev suggested. The minister agreed that all forecasts showed the company would not be profitable once the railway was completed, but he believed that could change over time. As reported, in mid-June it became known that the implementation of the ambitious Rail Baltica project was on the verge of failure. According to a joint assessment carried out by the Supreme Audit Institutions of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the total cost of the project has quadrupled over seven years from 5.8 billion to 23.8 billion euros. The situation is worst in Latvia: due to ineffective decisions of local officials and delays in attracting financing, the Latvian section of the future railway line has risen in price five times to 9.6 billion euros, which has become the reason for discussions about the advisability of continuing further work. Delfi tried to figure out why the Latvian authorities do not have enough money allocated by the European Union, how neighboring countries solve the problem of the shortage of funds, and whether it is still possible to abandon this initiative. Read more in the article The Rail Baltica project has risen in price five times. How did this happen and what to do with it next?
