Baltic States – CIS, Estonia, Port, Transport

The search for a potential developer continues despite the fact that the plan to build a soybean plant at Muuga is 15 years old and nobody has demonstrated interest in the project since the last economic crisis.

"We are looking for a new developer and haven't chosen to change the detailed plan," Triin Rum, marketing specialist at Port of Tallinn, told BNS.

The valid detailed plan says that the plot would serve as home to a soybean oil plant with a capacity of up to 400,000 tons per year.

Port of Tallinn is prepared to consider also other options, but that would require going through all authorization procedures again, Natalja Baidina, business manager for liquid bulk at the port company, told BNS in January last year.

The first company to come up with a plan to build a soybean oil plant at Muuga was Transiidikeskuse AS, which announced its intention in 2002. The plant costing an estimated 18 million dollars would have produced raw oil.

A couple of years later, in 2004, the size of the planned investment had risen to 70 million euros and in addition to oil and soybean meal the plant would have produced biodiesel from soybean oil.

A building permit was issued by the council of the Viimsi municipality in June 2006. Prior to it, in May 2006, Transiidikeskus sold majority shares in Muuga Sojatehas AS to the Russian company Russkoye Maslo.

Work was never started despite a reassurance by the company's then manager Igor Kuznetsov in spring 2008 that the works, which had been called into question by skyrocketing construction prices in 2007, will now definitely start.

Citing problems with financing resulting from the economic crisis, Muuga Sojatehas temporarily halted work on the project in 2011. By that time the developers had paid fines to Port of Tallinn on multiple occasions for delaying the start of works.

Muuga Sojatehas AS was deleted from the commercial register at the end of September 2015. The last year it had filed its accounts for was 2010.