There is currently no clarity on the model for operating and managing the Rail Baltica railway line, according to a report on the Rail Baltica project situation study carried out by the supreme audit institutions of the Baltic States.
Briškens said that there is a "built-in conflict of interest" in the governance structure of Rail Baltica, which "has an inter-national joint venture in the middle [RB Rail], in which Latvia owns a third of the shares and delegates two of the six members of the Supervisory Board. This company has three national shareholders, in the case of Latvia, EDzL, which is a state-owned company. At the same time, the same companies that are shareholders in RB Rail are the national implementers, which RB Rail supervises.
"It is an absurd situation that a company oversees its own shareholders," said Briškens.
The Ministry of Transport is working on two tracks of action to change this.
One is to merge or add EDzL to Latvian Railways to form a single railway holding. At the same time, parallel work is being done to detach Latvian Railways from any kind of "Eastern technologies and information systems". It is also planned to transfer the shares of RB Rail from EDzL to the Ministry of Transport.
"The other direction is to take the shares of RB Rail out of EDzL by transferring them to the Ministry of Transport," Briškens said.
This could be a matter of several months.
According to the latest Rail Baltica cost-benefit analysis, the total cost of the line in the Baltics could reach €23.8 billion, including €15.3 billion for the first phase of the project in the Baltics and €6.4 billion in Latvia. A previous cost-benefit analysis in 2017 estimated the total cost of the project at €5.8 billion.
