Poland shipyard sale falls through again

Poland said it had again failed to sell off two struggling shipyards, after receiving tenders for only a slice of what was on offer, three months after a deal with Qatari investors fell through.
The Polish treasury said that it had been able to attract buyers for just a 10.5-million-zloty (2.5-million-euro, 3.8-million-dollar) share of the 119 million zloty assets of the yard at Szczecin in the northwest.
The sale of another yard, at Gdynia in the north, was more successful but still a disappointed -- only 90 million zloty of its 300-million-zloty value found buyers.
The treasury now plans to organise an auction for the unsold assets.
Neither yard is set to continue producing ships.
The shipbuilding sector has deep historical significance for Poles as the cradle of protests against the communist old order in the 1970s and 1980s.
In 2005, the European Commission, which polices competition rules in the 27-nation European Union, launched a probe of Polish state aid for the yards and eventually ruled that it had been used illegally to keep them in business.
In November 2008 Poland was ordered to either sell them or wind them up.
A much-trumpeted deal with investors from the Gulf state of Qatar fell through at the end of August and Poland won a green light from the European Commission for another try.
In July, the European Commission had cleared state aid at a third yard, in Gdynia's neighbouring port of Gdansk, but still ordered a major restructuring there.
The Gdansk yard was sold to Ukrainian shipbuilding group Donbass in 2007.
In 1980, a strike in Gdansk gave birth to 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 communism and has repeatedly struggled since the advent of the free market in 1990.