Three Seas Initiative could help rebuild businesses in Poland, Lithuania: president

The second and last day of President Andrzej Duda's visit to Lithuania focused on business issues, with the Polish head of state underlining the importance of the Three Seas Initiative, a regional cooperation project involving 12 EU states lying in a belt between the Baltic, Adriatic and Black seas, in rebuilding economies hit by the pandemic.

Polish President Andrzej Duda and his Lithuanian counterpart Gitanas Nauseda in Vilnius.

Photo: PAP/Jakub Szymczuk/KPRP

On Wednesday, Duda and Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda opened a Polish-Lithuanian online business forum.

The event aimed to bring together the most innovative entrepreneurs from Poland and Lithuania and enable an exchange of views on how to advance joint prosperity and create win-win partnerships.

It focused on issues including energy and mobility, defence technologies and engineering as well as start-ups.

Debates also centred on the situation of small and mid-sized businesses in both countries.

“The prospects for small and medium enterprises are far from optimistic. Certain studies show that in the months to come, a significant number of European companies are considering filing for bankruptcy if the overall economic situation does not improve,” Duda said at the opening meeting.

He added that he believed the Three Seas Initiative “as a project of purely economic character, complementary to the process of European integration, may be the answer to our entrepreneurs' problems.”