TARNOW, Poland, May 16 (Reuters) - Poland said on Saturday it will sell its state-owned Szczecin shipyard, one of the birthplaces of the Solidarity trade union which helped topple communism, to United International Trust.
The sale is part of a plan agreed with the European Commission to try to save jobs and production in Polish shipyards after the commission ordered them to repay more than 2 billion euros ($2.71 billion) of illegal state aid.
Treasury minister Aleksander Grad said United International Trust, which is also buying another shipyard in Gdynia, had promised to keep producing ships at both plants.
“We have picked the same investor for the Szczecin shipyard as for the Gdynia… The investor will for sure continue building ships,” Grad told a news conference in his home town Tarnow.
Grad gave no details of the Szczecin shipyard deal.
Szczecin, along with Gdynia and Gdansk shipyards, has symbolic importance for Poles as a stronghold of the Solidarity trade union which helped toppled communism in 1989.
However, the European Commission ordered the Baltic shipyards to pay back more than 2 billion euros in illegal state aid received over a number of years, raising the spectre of closure and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.
Grad told Reuters he was optimistic about prospects for the third Polish shipbuilding plant Gdansk, which has already been privatised to ISD Polska — a unit of Ukraine’s Donbas.
“I believe that we will soon have some good news for the Gdansk shipyard as well. The investor has to update some information (for the European Commission) about its investment plans,” Grad told Reuters.
Polish media have said the yards were likely to be sold off piecemeal to non-maritime businesses. (Reporting by Wojciech Zurawski and Patryk Wasilewski; Editing by Dominic Evans)
