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If Climate Minister Kristian Michal raised the idea that the company itself could borrow the missing funds for the construction of Rail Baltica, Finance Minister Mate Voklaev suggested on the “Uudis+” program that RB Rail could be listed on the stock exchange.
Voklayeva said he was optimistic that despite the increased cost of building the railway, the necessary funds could be raised and hoped that sufficient funds would still be received from Europe.
“Estonia’s current budget is 3.1 billion euros. We have already covered 1.2 billion euros with funds from the last European funding period and the current one. On the government side, we have also set priorities for the next funding period. /… ./ It also includes associations as part of security. As an important thing, we are optimistic that we will receive the same amount as now, and we have a program of more than 900 million that should be covered and planned,” said Voklaev.
According to this calculation, 900 million euros are missing and must be planned at least partially from the state budget. In the meantime, we have to look for new solutions, but to find additional funds we can consider going public, Võrklaev noted.
“Just as the climate minister proposed (raising funds) by lending to Rail Baltica, which admittedly could also affect the balance of the state budget, /…/ (then) for my part, the idea was raised that we could work with this company. We know that a company that plans to build a nuclear power plant in Estonia has already made public investments – so why not do it for infrastructure goals of this century, which are important for the economy and the security of the entire Baltic Sea region, and I believe that people could be interested in this,” Voklaev said.
The network agreed that all forecasts now indicated that the company would not be profitable when the railway was completed, but he believed that this could change over time.
“The thing is, we still need to work on the project to create additional demand and at least try to make it more profitable. The more real the railway is, the more real the plans of the state and the companies are, how to start using this railway, what to transport there, it creates new business opportunities,” he said.
“We now have no choice but to complete the construction of this railway and then see if it is profitable. /…/ The option is to take it to the stock exchange and hope that there is still interest and people believe that this project will be profitable one day,” Võrklaev said.
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