Opab, a Swedish firm, applied for a permit to explore for oil in the Baltic Sea, the Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat reported. The company hopes to find 300 's 350 million barrels of oil, or enough to cover 20 percent of Sweden's oil consumption for a 20-year-period. According to Erik Palmlov, chief geologist with Opab's mother company Svenska Petroleum Exploration, the oil field straddles the boundary of five countries' exclusive economic zones but extends 110 kilometers into Sweden's zone south of Gotland. Opab wants to start with test drilling next fall and to begin extracting in 2012-2013 if crude oil is found.
Tallinna Sadam (Port of Tallinn) handled a total of 10.3 million tons of goods in January-April this year, a dramatic fall of 32.1 percent year-on-year. Oil products handling fell by 19 percent to 7.3 million tons, the report said. Timber handling plummeted 73.4 percent, coal 98 percent and fertilizer 58 percent. By contrast, the number of passengers passing through the port grew 13.6 percent to 1.8 million. Most of them 's 86.6 percent 's traveled on the Tallinn-Helsinki route.
Rokiskio Suris, Lithuania's largest dairy group, reported a loss of 9.4 million litas (2.7 million euros) for the first three months of this year, down from a profit of 3.5 million litas in the same period last year. First quarter sales shrank 3.6 percent to 138.8 million litas. The company attributed the poor financials to a plunge in the price of products for exports, lower demand and an approximate 50 percent surge in the prices of raw milk.
