VILNIUS - The Lithuanian government is set to give the Ministry of Energy more influence in the management of national energy company Leo LT after the Constitutional Court found the company to be unconstitutionally founded.
Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius said the company's supervisory board would be changed, but wouldn't comment on individual members of the board.
The government announced that the board would be changed because it is unhappy with the company's performance in the first year of operation.
Kubilius agreed on radio with EU Budget Commissioner Dalia Grybauskaite that Leo LT is "the top form of oligarchisation in Lithuania," and should be changed.
Kubilius said the current government had to correct some of its predecessors' decisions to ensure adequate and fair representation of the state.
BRAND NEW?
He also said, however, he wouldn't dismantle Leo LT into the electricity companies it had been formed from and responded to criticism that the changes were only "cosmetic."
"I do not know whether these are cosmetic things 's if the consumers get cheaper electricity, have the right to choose the supplier of energy, if there is real competition on the market, if the implementation of key strategic objectives gets much more effective, I do not know whether it would be purely cosmetics," the prime minister said about the plans for the company after the restructure.
Grybauskaite challenged the government over the affair, saying that it would have to make a political decision to sort out the mess.
"The law and the very establishment of that company are considered anti-constitutional, and the court's ruling may be interpreted like that, and it proves that the process, the establishment of the entity, has an anti-constitutional element. The law, the management shall be modified, we have to ensure that the structure, if we are to establish it, serves its purpose," she said.
The government should eliminate the shortcomings identified by the court as soon as possible, Grybauskaite said. Also, policymakers must decide what kind of entity is needed and how it should be managed.
"Now the impression is that the entity [Leo LT] is giving law to the state and not vice versa," Grybauskaite said.
NEW BOARD
Leo LT's press representative told The Baltic Times that the current situation was unclear and that the Ministry of Energy would only make its recommendations at the end of March.
Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius has said that the management of the national energy company Leo LT will have to be revamped to ensure that the state's interests are properly represented.
"The Constitutional Court has clearly stated that the representation of the state's interests must be very clearly reflected in Leo LT's management bodies. This means that, first of all, the supervisory board and, possibly, the management board should be reformed accordingly," Kubilius said on Lithuanian Radio.
The prime minister spoke a day after the country's Constitutional Court ruled that a law that paved the way for the establishment of Leo LT 's which is in charge of billions of litas worth of key energy projects 's violated the Constitution.
The Energy Minister was unavailable for comment at the time when TBT went to print.
The government holds a 61.7 percent stake in Leo LT while NDX Energija, a privately owned company, controls the remaining 38.3 percent.
VP Grupe, which also owns Akropolis and Maxima, owns NDX Energija among other brands.
Leo LT was created last May by merging the state-owned shares in the transmission system operator Lietuvos Energija (Lithuanian Energy) and the distribution grid operator Rytu Skirstomieji Tinklai (RST) with NDX Energija's shares in VST, the other distribution grid operator.
