Poland to unveil shipyard privatization plans

The Polish government on Thursday said investors interested in the privatisation of the country’s ailing shipyards would present their plans in time for an EU deadline of 12 September.

Following Polish promises to present viable plans for the restructuring of ailing yards by the September deadline, the European Commission said in July it was postponing a state-aid decision on the Gdynia and Szczecin shipyards that risked bankruptcy. Both state-owned yards are deeply in debt. The move came after the commission had rejected a fresh set of restructuring plans presented by Warsaw as being out of step with EU competition regulations on public subsidies.

Ukraine’s powerful Industrial Union of Donbass (ISD) consortium has expressed interest in acquiring the Gdynia yard. It wants to link Gdynia with the nearby yard in Gdansk, which it took over last year. Mostostal Chojnice-Ulstein, a Polish-Norwegian consortium, is interested in the Szczecin yard and a series of meetings between the companies and the Treasury were scheduled during the coming week.

The Treasury also revealed that fresh restructuring plans will demand yet more state subsidies for the yards, but that part of the funding would eventually be reimbursed.

For the yards in Gdynia and Gdansk subsidies will rise to 835 million zloty (250 million euro, $356 million),” the Treasury minister said during a Thursday parliamentary debate. “For the Szczecin yard, total subsidies will rise to 400 million zlotys,” he added. However, earlier the minister stressed “the (European) Commission has been informally informed about the need for subsidies and the negotiations have not been broken off.”

A probe launched in 2005 by the commission found Poland had ploughed 2.1 billion Euros ($3 billion) in public aid into the yards in recent years. Warsaw says the total is far lower but Brussels may order that the yards repay a comparable sum should it reject the government plan on 12 September. The move would likely bankrupt the historic yards, which like Gdansk became symbols of Poland’s anti-communist opposition. According to Warsaw, some 60,000 people are employed in the yards and by their sub-contractors.