One investment project under consideration in Green Corridor, but 11 for military projects - LIAA

RIGA - Currently, there is one project under review in the Green Corridor initiative for investment projects, but overall, seven applications with a total planned investment of EUR 76 million have been approved in the first months of the year, Ieva Jagere, director of the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia (LIAA), said in an interview LETA.

Meanwhile, the special military investment Green Corridor established last year includes a total of 11 military manufacturing projects on its list, with a total planned investment of EUR 223 million, said Jagere, while emphasizing that she could not say anything more about these projects.

When asked whether these projects are comparable in scale to the ammunition plant planned by Germany’s Rheinmetall, Jagere stated that Rheinmetall is certainly the largest project among those announced, but there are projects that investors are ready to expand and develop further if the initial phase is successful.

Jagere also noted, however, that Latvia itself had to raise the bar for which projects qualify for the Green Corridor, which means that an investor can be processed on an expedited basis.

"Previously, we proactively placed 600 companies in this Green Corridor ourselves and realized that it wouldn’t really work, because then the Green Corridor loses its meaning, and the agencies responsible for providing services began warning about problems. At the beginning of this year, amendments to the Cabinet of Ministers’ regulations were approved, raising the criteria for entering the Green Corridor, and now about 300 businesses meet them," said Jagere.

When asked where bottlenecks occur in faster investor service, the LIAA director acknowledged that this is most often related to environmental impact assessments and other permits tied to environmental issues.

"These assessment processes are very complex, especially for large projects, and human resources are often insufficient to carry them out, which is why we are unable to ensure the speed that would be necessary. Solutions must be found here. Because when investors are asked what criteria they use to decide whether to invest in one country or another, they point to the speed of decision-making, so that investments can be made within a specific timeframe," said the head of the LIAA.

Since 2021, a total of 126 applications worth EUR 8.6 billion have been approved under the Green Corridor initiative.

As previously reported, starting in 2021, businesses planning to implement investment projects in priority sectors have the opportunity to receive public administration services in the areas of construction, land use planning, and migration on a priority basis by obtaining LIAA status.