Polish shipyards sale to Qataris fails

The long-awaited sale of two struggling Polish shipyards to Qatari investors has fallen through after the buyers failed to pay up, officials said on Tuesday, in a blow to a deeply symbolic sector for Poles. In a statement, the treasury ministry said it had "not received the funds offered by the private investor Stichting Particulier Fonds Greenrights for parts of the Gdynia and Szczecin shipyards." The two Baltic Sea yards are now facing bankruptcy. That is grim news for their 8,000 workers, who have been in limbo for months. "We're floored, completely shocked," Szczecin employee Janusz Petrynski, 59, told AFP. Confusion had reigned over the sale of the yards, which have deep historical significance for Poles because the shipbuilding sector was the cradle of protests against the communist old order in the 1970s and 1980s.
In May, Warsaw announced that they had been sold but refused to give details. The following month, the treasury said that the buyer was Qatari bank QInvest, but the latter said it was simply acting as an adviser in the deal.
Stichting Particulier Fonds Greenrights is based in Curacao, a Caribbean offshore haven run by the Netherlands. The initial deadline for the 364-million-zloty (87-million-euro, 123-million-dollar) payment was July 21. It was later pushed back to August 17 after the investors asked for more time in order to investigate claims of corruption among the Szczecin yard's previous management -- an allegation Poland rejected. Warsaw had hailed the sale as a sign of Gulf investor confidence in the ex-communist country, which joined the European Union in 2004 and has enjoyed robust economic growth, so far bucking the recession biting hard elsewhere.
The shipyard deal had come in the wake of a long-term natural gas supply accord between Poland and energy-rich Qatar. Poland had in November been ordered by the European Commission to either sell or wind up the two yards. The commission, which polices competition rules in the 27-nation EU, had in 2005 launched a probe of Polish state aid of the yards, and eventually ruled that it had been used illegally to keep them in business. Slawomir Nowak, a senior aide to Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, on Tuesday said that Warsaw would ask the commission for more time to find a new buyer. "We're going to restart the process and look for a new investor," Nowak told Poland's state broadcaster TVP. On Monday, treasury spokesman Maciej Wewior had warned what would happen if the payment did not materialise.
"If the money isn't paid out, we will have to do what we've been trying to avoid doing: launch bankruptcy moves," Wewior said.
The issue of a third shipyard in Gdynia's neighbouring port of Gdansk has being handled separately by Brussels, which has yet to give its verdict on a restructuring plan there. Last month the European Commission threw a lifeline to the Gdansk shipyard, giving post facto approval to previous state aid there but still ordering a major restructuring of operations there.
The yard has already been sold to Ukrainian shipbuilding group Donbass, which acquired it in 2007 and plans to slash capacity.
Poland's shipbuilders were on the front line in protests against the communist regime.
Dozens of people were killed at the yards when security forces fired on workers demonstrating against food price rises in 1970.
In 1980, a strike at what was then the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk led to the creation of the trade union Solidarity, which snowballed across the shipbuilding industry into a nationwide protest movement.
Driven underground by a military clampdown in 1981, Solidarity re-emerged to negotiate a peaceful end to communist rule in 1989.
Poland's shipbuilding sector was already in difficulty before the collapse of the communist command economy, and has repeatedly struggled since the introduction of the free market.