The Commission on Tuesday heard from a Lithuanian member of the Supervisory Board of RB Rail and former Acting State Secretary at the Ministry of Transport Ligita Austrupe who resigned two weeks ago.
The 36-page interim report is also being examined by the commission. It contains 13 findings.
One, for example, is that according to the 2014 Ministry of Transport tender report, RB Latvija's tender was considered the most economically advantageous on the basis of the price offered, even though RB Latvija scored second worst out of all potential suppliers in terms of the quality of the service description.
Then, also according to the 2014 order of then Minister of Transport Anrijs Matīss, the Rail Baltica management group was composed only of officials from the Ministry of Transport. It did not include a single person with experience in managing railway projects at this level, both infrastructure and financing.
Another interesting tidbit is that there were even 14 options for including Rīga in the project, Latvian Radio reports. But the Ministry of Transport only pushed one option to the government without clearly identifying the other options and comparing the costs of all the introductions to Riga.
The Ministry of Transport and the responsible officials, while reporting to the Cabinet of Ministers on the required European money and also the state budget funding, pointed out that the risk of not obtaining the required European co-financing for the completion of the Riga Central Station - Riga International Airport section is low, ignoring and not refuting the project risks identified by the Ministries of Finance and Justice and the State Chancellery, thus creating a misconception for the government, the interim report concludes.
The Commission found that the Ministry of Transport tried not to show the Cabinet the true cost increase of the Rail Baltica project by recalculating it in 2016 prices to make the cost appear less high. The Commission of Inquiry has also found that the Ministry of Transport has already presented the cost of the Rail Baltica project as €3.4 billion in its 2021 presentations.
The Commission has made some suggestions on how to improve the management of the project. The interim report will be approved and possibly changed, then sent to the Saeima. The final report will be submitted to the Saeima in mid-December.
