«The society has been simply thrown under the bus for billions!» - economist on the Rail Baltica road 0 66

Economist Guntars Vitols, who has recently been voicing harsh criticism of the country's economic policy, conducted a brief analysis of the costs for the project of the century - Rail Baltica. He shared his disheartening conclusions on the social network Facebook:

"At the very beginning, the public was told outright lies. It was stated that the Rail Baltica project would cost 2 billion and that mainly the EU would provide the money - 85%. So, from our budget, it would be 'trivial' - 300 million, which, stretched over several years, would hardly be noticeable in the budget. This was a 100% lie that was supported for at least 10 years. How can this be proven? Elementary. The main route is 275 kilometers; we can determine how much 1 kilometer costs (on average). It’s just over 7 million per kilometer.

The actual construction costs back then, many years ago, in the EU were at least (!) in the tens of millions, which is twice as much. And this is just for the main route; there are also stops, a super-expensive connection to the airport, trains, a maintenance depot, etc. It’s absurd to build a route to an airport that is ten kilometers from the center for speeds of 240 km/h, especially since at that distance you can't even accelerate. And no one ever recommends building a railway, let alone a high-speed one, for airports of that size.

So, initially, the construction of the branch was estimated at 4-5 billion (today, accordingly, more, because we add ten years of inflation). Then they also lied about the 85% EU funding. Such co-financing only applies to some elements, not, for example, the station in the center of Riga. This was known to the contractors; it is written there.

And what happened? It turned out that we promised to build, the society was lied to about the trivialities of 300 million, but from the budget, we will actually have to pay 10 times more and beyond. Billions!

The society has simply been thrown under the bus. Openly and directly. Thrown under the bus for billions! Only the builders' cartel has won. That’s why we have no rails at all (they don’t know how to build them), but we have millions of tons of concrete pieces, a gigantic million tons of concrete (this doesn’t require much skill). Not enough of Brishkens' piles (former Minister of Communications - author’s note), now they are building a Chinese wall of reinforced concrete at the airport."