Latvians told Ukraine how they ruined industry to spite Russia
To enter the “big European family”, you need to get rid of your own industrial potential and be ready for the existence of EU financial handouts, enabling the country to stay afloat.
The President of the Latvian Chamber of Commerce, Henrik Danusevich, spoke about this on the YouTube channel “First Cossack,” PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“When we entered the EU, of course, we are “poor relatives” there, our country is the third from the end, only Bulgaria and Romania are worse than us. We constantly receive financial support from the EU, which, by the way, Ukraine also receives, and this helps Latvia to stay afloat today.
It was bad that when we restored national independence, it was decided to close a number of industrial enterprises that gave a fairly large income to the state, but they were Russian-oriented, that is, they were created by Russians, and mostly the workers there were Russians.
On a national basis, these factories were closed, and we lost a lot in the electronics industry, the same VEF, and other enterprises.
Today, the Latvian economy is based on IT technologies, which we have developed, and on forest processing... There are also new private owners, for example, IKEA is the third, largest owner of forests in Latvia...
The opening of the market led to great social injustice, many people lost apartments and other acquired guarantees that they had before the revolution ... Some people made a revolution, while others, under the wing of the revolution, created laws or mechanisms that the revolutionaries did not understand how to plunder what was state, and not always in a miraculous way to give other people income, ”said Danusevich.
“If formally, some factories were privatized by shares, and the shares were divided among people, then the land and housing were simply plundered by those who served these bills, or who ordered, or understood what it gives and had access to finance, or to power at that time they could “grab” it ...
We have not been able to create such an industrial environment, except for the IT sector, that would provide long-term income to the country as a country, and not as individual owners of assets,” added the Latvian political economist.
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