“President believes that Lithuania’s strategic goal is to get rid of its energy dependence and to synchronize the energy systems of Lithuania and the Baltic countries with the energy grids of Western Europe. And all projects being implemented in Lithuania shall meet the top standards of security and transparency. Rosatom’s standards of transparency and security raise doubts,” Martynas Lukoševičius, Grybauskaitė’s foreign policy adviser, said in an interview to Žinių Radijas on Tuesday.
He would not make any comments about the fact that parliamentary speaker Vydas Gedvilas secretly met with a representative of Rosatom. The meeting, which was not announced officially, was initiated by Social Democratic MP Mindaugas Baštys, who told BNS last Saturday that an acquaintance of his, Alexander Merten, vice-president of Rosatom’s subsidiary Rusatom Overseas, had asked to organize the meeting.
The representatives of Rusatom Overseas attended the meeting between the representatives of Rosatom-owned Germany’s Nukem, which is implementing decommissioning projects at Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP), and Lithuania’s Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevičius during his visit to the shut-down facility last week.
Rosatom’s representatives stated that they were interested in Lithuania’s Kruonis Pumped Storage Plant as a facility that could secure reserve capacities for the nuclear power plant under construction in the Russian Kaliningrad region, Butkevičius then said.
Atomstroyexport, a subsidiary of Rosatom, owns 100 percent of Nukem’s shares.