The Baltic countries failed to agree on a shareholder agreement for a Rail Baltica joint venture in Vilnius on Thursday, a Lithuanian official said, adding that Latvia and Estonia remain opposed to including Vilnius into the European-standard gauge railway project.
The Baltic countries failed to agree on a shareholder agreement for a Rail Baltica joint venture in Vilnius on Thursday, a Lithuanian official said, adding that Latvia and Estonia remain opposed to including Vilnius into the European-standard gauge railway project.
“We managed to read through the entire agreement, but the issue of Vilnius remains unsolved. We agreed that on 10 January we would discuss specifically the linking of the capitals,” Arenijus Jackus, director of the Lithuanian Transport Ministry’s Development and International Relations Department, told BNS on Friday.
“As you probably understand, the joint venture will not be established by 1 January,” he said.
Other disagreements over the shareholders’ agreement are non-essential and will be resolved in one or another way, but the issue of a branch to Vilnius remains problematic, the official said.
“For some reason, they do not regard this (Vilnius) as part of Rail Baltica and as an issue agreed on in the declaration signed by the ministers. We read it differently and think that it was agreed upon,” he said.
If the neighbouring countries say that Vilnius was not agreed on in the declaration, it can also be said that Latvia and Estonia cannot build additional links to airports and other facilities, because they are not mentioned in the declaration, Jackus said.
“However, we will sit down and discuss the issue of the capitals on 10 January , which alone is a considerable achievement,” the Transport Ministry official said.
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