It come in sight to buy forests controlled by Swedish shareholders

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According to the Ministry of Agriculture, the state company Latvijas valsts meži (Latvian State Forests or hereinafter LSF), on behalf of the Minister of Agriculture Janis Duklavs, assesses the possibility of buying forests from the company Bergvik Skog controlled by Swedish shareholders. At the same time, as the ministry emphasizes, this is a commercial transaction, so they cannot provide exact information on the amount and other details before making specific decisions. The newspaper Latvijas avize previously reported that 20 companies showed interest in the Latvian forests belonging to the Swedish company Bergvik Skog, including three Latvian ones. Forests Bergvik Skog plans to sell their forests before the end of this year.

As reported by the newspaper, all participants in the negotiations for the purchase of the forests have signed the nondisclosure of information, so it is not known whether there is a LSF among them. However, forest industry experts consider it only natural if the state tries to get into its ownership almost 10% of the Latvian forests which were sold to Bergwik Skog a long time ago. The company owns approximately 110,000 hectares of land, of which two-thirds are forests, and the rest are agricultural and other land. The newspaper Latvijas avīze writes that due to the fact that the LSF do not have finance enough for such a transaction, they will have to borrow. According to experts, the average price of forest in this transaction can be 1700-2000 euro per hectare or even slightly more. In 2017, the turnover of Bergvik Skog amounted to 2.423 million euros, profit – 275,931 euros. The company was registered in 2003, its fixed capital is 106,025 million euros.

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