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Weekly Lists
February 9, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 27
bne:
Infrastructure
Chair shaking beneath Rail Baltica CEO
The prime ministers of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania are expected to meet to discuss the apparently looming dismissal of Baiba Rubesa, the CEO of RB Rail, the company responsible for the
Rail Baltica project to connect the Baltic states to the European railway network.
The controversy surrounding the earlier move by the Lithuanian and Estonian shareholders in RB Rail to vote in favour of a non- confidence motion against Rubesa has reached the top political level, exposing notorious tensions in joint projects carried out by the three Baltic states.
The Latvian PM Maris Kucinskis wants to hear the “justification behind the Estonian and Lithuanian shareholders' vote of no-confidence against Rubesa”, BNS reported. The Latvian government is reportedly facing questions at home as to why its shareholder representative in RB Rail only abstained in the non- confidence vote instead of giving their compatriot Rubesa support.
Rubesa has been RB Rail’s CEO since October 2015. It is not clear why Rubesa appears to have fallen out of favour with the majority of shareholders in the project other than they were “dissatisfied with Rubesa’s job performance and a differing vision of the company’s work”, according to Leta.
A railway connection between the town of Astara in southern Azer- baijan and the similarly named town on the other side of the border with Iran experienced its inaugural freight train journey on February 8 in the presence of several Iranian and Azerbaijani officials.
The first train to use the connection was a freight train carrying unspecified goods from St. Petersburg to Iran. The connection is
an important part of Azerbaijan and Iran's efforts to integrate their transport infrastructure, given that by using it trains can travel from Russia to Iran and vice versa. The construction project to integrate the Iranian and Azerbaijani railways cost close to $1bn and was financed by Baku. It lent Iran $500mn for works on its side of the border.
According to Ali Khodaei, director general of Iran's state-owned rail- ways company IRI Railways, the connection will be used to transport petroleum products, minerals, grains and fibreboard and will open a new chapter in cooperation between the two countries. "The rail- way will strengthen the economic ties between Azerbaijan and Iran, which intensifies mutual cooperation considerably," he said.
Iran-Azerbaijan railway connection launches