STOCKHOLM, Jan 14 (Reuters) — Scandinavia's biggest builder Skanska said on Tuesday it would exit certain markets, making its business more predictable, and planned to reduce capital employed by around 20 percent.
      Skanska said it would quit markets such as the construction business in Hungary, Latvia and Lithuania, and residential development in the United States, and limit South American operations. This would prompt Skanska to book a fourth-quarter writedown of 1.6 billion crowns ($184.1 million). Group goodwill would total 5.6 billion crowns after the writedown.
      Skanska said restructuring costs stemming from the exits would amount to 0.5 billion crowns, of which 0.1 billion would be a writedown on assets and have no impact on cash flow.
      "We will reduce the number of markets we operate in," said Tor Krusell, Skanska's head of information. "That will lead to us reducing capital employed which means that we will reduce the risk profile."
      "There is a significant upside in earnings in our construction business units at current sales levels by improving operating efficiency and control," Skanska said in a statement.
      It said that return on capital employed would be the most important factor for all businesses.
      "The ambition to reduce the group's capital employed is positive, but now it is up to Skanska to prove that it can live up to it," said one stock market trader.
      Group capital employed could be reduced by 20 percent to 30 billion crowns, Skanska said. It did not provide growth targets for this or next year, but said it aimed for an operating profit margin of at least 2.5 percent.
      Its current operating margin target is 2.5-3.0 percent.
      In late October, Skanska reported a nine-month pre-tax profit of 1.06 billion crowns, slightly below market expectations, on net sales of 107.7 billion.
      The company has suffered along with other construction firms from the slowing global economy, which has led to reduced investment in construction projects.
      Chief Executive Stuart Graham said in October that the company expected the total volume of construction investments to shrink during 2003 in its main markets, and it also expected net sales to fall.

      FREMONT, Calif., Jan. 15 /PRNewswire — FirstCall/ — The Riga City Council, which manages the municipal network for the Latvian capitol, has purchased the SCREAM(TM) Service Creation Manager platform from net.com (NYSE: NWK) for a multiservice broadband network. The project will connect over 300 schools, hospitals, police stations and other administrative institutions in Riga for voice, data, videoconferencing, traffic monitoring, and other multimedia applications. The network supports the Riga City Council's e-city concept, and also offers information services to Riga inhabitants to permit them to easily communicate with different municipal institutions.
      Riga initially deployed SCREAM50 and SCREAM100 platforms for ATM switching and traffic shaping. The municipality is now expanding with additional SCREAM50 nodes and SCREAMVue network management. The Riga City Council's Information and Technology Centre has built an extensive net.com Promina(R) multiservice network over the past four years and intends to leverage SCREAM's full open service creation capability to deliver differentiated levels, or class, of service with quality of service (QoS) to the multiple facilities served by the network. SCREAM also constitutes the multiservice backbone for the capitol's broadband wireless access network, which currently has four base stations and approximately 70 remote terminal units, to provide connectivity with throughput of two to 20 Mbps to each remote location.
      A Capitol Application
      The SCREAM platform integrates native ATM and IP capabilities to deliver broadband aggregation, cell and packet switching, and IP services capabilities that lower operating and capital expenses. SCREAM solutions are also the platforms on which developed services may be dynamically defined, delivered and managed.
      Eriks Zegelis, director of the Information and Technology Centre of the Riga City Council, noted, "We are very proud of this expansion, which enables more advanced services while more efficiently providing the bandwidth required for dynamic connections and management of the network for our schools, libraries, hospitals, police stations and other institutions. It is a very progressive solution that will further provide us with the capability of direct accounting for each institution with SCREAM's ability to easily integrate with our internal billing systems. Additionally, we were very impressed with how easy it was to increase the capacity of the network data plane of the existing equipment with this expansion."
      Victor Belov, Managing Director of Dan Communications, noted, "We are delighted to offer SCREAM as the best solution for our premier customer. It provides the flexibility and scalability required for the future growth and expansion of the Riga City Council's network, one of the most advanced in Europe. Riga requirements demand a robust ATM solution today with a migration path to IP for the future. SCREAM offers that capability and also enables a platform for expanding services easily going forward."
      About net.com
      Network Equipment Technologies, Inc., doing business as net.com, builds service creation platforms for broadband, IP telephony, and multiservice networks. For network service providers and operators, net.com platforms enable a fast return on investment, lower operating expenses, and profit from rapid creation and delivery of new services to end users. net.com pioneered multiservice networking, used by service providers, government organizations, and businesses worldwide. A founder of the Service Creation Community, net.com leads in service creation, the new profitability model for network service providers.
      NOTE: net.com, SCREAM Service Creation Manager and SCREAMvue are trademarks of, and Promina is a registered trademark of, Network Equipment Technologies, Inc.
      /CONTACT: media, Brenda Ropoulos of net.com, +1-510-574-2508/
      /Web site: http://www.net.com /

      RIGA, Latvia (AP) — Latvia's parliament rejected a proposal Thursday to make Russian Orthodox Christmas a national holiday.
      Ethnic Russians in Latvia have lobbied for the holiday — celebrated Jan. 7 -- since the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
      Supporters said the measure would have helped mend relations with the country's Russian community, who account for about 40 percent of the Baltic Sea coast nation's 2.5 million residents.
      Despite garnering 39 votes in favor and none against, the measure failed because 54 lawmakers abstained from voting, parliament spokeswoman Innese Alunina said. Under Latvian law, a majority of lawmakers most vote on a bill for it to pass.
      President Vaira Vike-Freiberga urged lawmakers last month to support the measure, the first prominent politician to do so.
      Most Latvians are Lutheran or Roman Catholic, celebrating Christmas on Dec. 25, which is a national holiday.
      Most ethnic Russians immigrated to Latvia after World War II and many take Jan. 7 off from work to attend Christmas services.

      RIGA, Latvia (AP) — Nazi hunters launched a last-ditch advertising campaign Friday in this ex-Soviet republic, offering a $10,000 reward for information that could mean the prosecution of aging Holocaust collaborators.
      Ads will appear in several newspapers across this Baltic Sea nation through the weekend as part of "Operation Last Chance," an effort to prosecute Nazi war criminals led by the Los Angeles, California-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.
      "During the Holocaust, local collaborators helped the Nazis murder about 100,000 local and foreign Jews," reads the text of the large black-and-white ad, which also features a grainy photo of Jews being led -- luggage in tow -- to killing sites.
      Some 80,000 Jews in Latvia, 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population, were killed during the 1941-44 Nazi occupation, with Germans and Latvians taking part. Thousands of Jews from Europe were also sent to Latvia for execution.
      The Simon Wiesenthal Center — which has been devoted to tracking down ex-Nazis -- and the Miami, Florida-based Targum Shlishi Foundation designed and paid for the advertisement, which included telephone numbers for the Latvian prosecutor's office.
      Dzintra Subrovska, a spokeswoman for Latvia's Prosecutor General's Office, said any information would be welcomed.
      "If anyone comes forward with information we are ready to investigate," she said.
      Latvia has yet to prosecute an alleged Nazi war criminal since it regained independence after the 1991 Soviet collapse. Prosecutors said gathering evidence against the few surviving suspects -- men in their 80s and 90s -- has been difficult.
      "The fact that somebody has got away with this for 50 years does not diminish the nature of the crime," said Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon Weisenthal Center's Jerusalem office.
      The Soviets tried and convicted hundreds of people accused of Nazi atrocities in Latvia immediately after the war.
      Similar ads ran in neighboring Lithuania late last year and will run in Estonian newspapers later this month.
      About 100 people responded to the ads in Lithuania, Zuroff said, but the information has not led to any arrests.

      BRUSSELS, Jan 21 (Reuters) — The 10 countries set to join the European Union next year must spend between 80 billion and 110 billion euros ($85-117 billion) to meet EU environmental norms, the bloc's top environment official said on Tuesday.
      The mostly impoverished, ex-communist countries need to spend the equivalent of between two and three percent of gross domestic product on such things as new sewage plants and waste incinerators, EU Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom said.
      "In most cases countries are below the two percent figure," Wallstrom told a news briefing after a meeting with the candidate countries' environment ministers.
      "They will have to raise private capital and go to the international financial institutions and so on," she added.
      The 10 states, ranging from the former Soviet republic of Estonia in the north to the Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Malta, have to adopt 149 EU environmental laws.
      All candidate countries have negotiated deadlines that mean they can enter the EU in April 2004 before complying fully with all environmental regulations in place. But Wallstrom said she would be strict in ensuring the deadlines are met.
      "Existing member states will not allow environmental dumping," she said, reflecting concerns among some companies in western Europe that rivals in the east will face lower costs if allowed to flout EU rules.
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      The most expensive EU law facing the new member states will be the waste water directive, which requires cities to have proper sewage treatment facilities. That will cost the 10 countries more than 25 billion euros, the Commission said.
      Another, the landfill directive which restricts the use of waste dumps, will cost up to 12 billion euros.
      Some EU cash will be available to help with investments, Wallstrom said, but the countries will have to find much of the money themselves.
      Wallstrom told the ministers to make friends with their finance ministers. "They will have to be environment ministers' best allies," she said.
      But Wallstrom said the benefits to the environment would be measurable. Improved air quality standards would prevent up to 34,000 premature deaths in those countries, she said.
      Public health benefits from cleaner air could save the countries 6.5 billion euros a year, the Commission said. Total benefits from EU environmental policies could be worth between 12 and 69 billion euros a year.
      The 10 countries due to join the bloc in 2004 are Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. Most are expected to hold a referendum during 2003 on membership.
      ($1-.9383 Euro)

      TALLINN, Estonia (AP) — The ex-Soviet Baltic republics may be on the fast track to the European Union -- but officials complain that rail links to Europe are going nowhere.
      Now the three states, united by the shared experience of Soviet occupation, are pitching a plan to build a modern railway that would link the new Baltics with the new Europe.
      Government spokesmen said that plan would mean replacing some the of Soviet-era tracks with railroads that are compatible with western Europe. The next step is the introduction of modern electric trains that can travel as fast as 200 kilometers (125 miles) per hour from Tallinn, Estonia's capital, to Berlin, Germany, in just seven hours.
      The Baltics won coveted invitations to join the European Union last month -- culminating a decade-long drive that began after breaking from Moscow during the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. They're expected to become full-fledged members in 2004.
      However, traveling from what will become the northeastern edge of the EU to the center of the continent's business and cultural hubs is time consuming and costly. The distance -- Berlin, for example is 1,050 kilometers (630 miles) from Tallinn, the northernmost Baltic capital, while Paris is 1,700 kilometers (1,020 miles) from Riga, Latvia -- leaves many Balts feeling isolated.
      Daniel Vaarik, an Estonian government spokesman, said the new rail service could foster EU goals of bringing Europe together -- economically and culturally.
      "Our geographical distance to many European cities is not that great, but it is in the time it takes," he told The Associated Press Tuesday.
      As it stands, there is no regular passenger or freight rail traffic from the Baltic states to Western Europe. Traveling by car from Tallinn to Berlin means driving the mostly single-lane, poorly lit Baltic highways for at least 20 hours.
      And most airfare is prohibitively expensive. A one-way ticket between Tallinn and Berlin can cost more than 500 euros (US$534), more than Estonia's average monthly wage of about 5,000 kroons (US$300). Tickets for the proposed rail line would cost just half that, still expensive, but more manageable.
      The line, dubbed Rail Baltica, would run some 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) from Tallinn -- through Riga, Latvia's capital, and Vilnius, Lithuania's capital -- to Berlin, according to the head of Estonia's Railway Department, Oleg Epner.
      He said the project — five years in the planning — has been pitched to the EU as well as Poland, which would have part of the railway running through it.
      The rail line was also discussed during a Baltic state summit last week, said Solveiga Silkalne, an adviser to Latvian Prime Minister Einars Repse.
      She said the nations' leaders "lent their support to the long-term goals of the project."
      However, Estonian and Lithuanian government spokesmen said a final decision about pushing the project forward won't come for months, if not years.
      Epner said it would take a decade to lay the EU standard, 1435-millimeter-wide (56-inch-wide) track -- which would replace the wider, 1520-millimeter (60-inch) track favored by Soviet engineers.
      "By 2015, I want to be able to climb on a train with my laptop and a cup of coffee in Tallinn and be in Berlin in seven hours," Epner said.
      "This will help increase everything from cargo (traffic) to tourism," Silkalne said in Riga, where officials for years have complained that there are no cost-effective ways to bring tourists to Latvia.
      Most Baltic trade with Western Europe — including Russian oil shipped through the Baltics to western markets -- is done through seaports. A railroad could improve shipping time and lessen the risk of a disaster at sea.
      Estonian Prime Minister Siim Kallas, a fiscal conservative who has cast a skeptical eye on major infrastructure projects in the past, has come around with Rail Baltica, giving it serious consideration.
      Figuring out the cost is difficult, but Epner said similar rail projects have cost around 1 million euros (US$1.06 million) per kilometer of track. By that measure, the Tallinn-Berlin line would cost at least 1 billion euros (US$1.06 billion).
      He said it was a hefty price, but hoped the EU would help foot part of the bill.

      STOCKHOLM, Jan 22 (Reuters) — Latvia's Defence Minister Girts Valdis Kristovskis heaped criticism on Russia on Wednesday, saying it wanted to see a "toothless" NATO.
      Speaking at a security policy conference in Sweden, Kristovskis said: "Russia, today, wishes to minimise the influence of NATO, encouraging it to become a peacekeeping force and thereby reduce its war-fighting capabilities."
      The Baltic state, which won independence when the Soviet Union collapsed just over a decade ago, is to join NATO in 2004.
      The defence alliance's eastward expansion was strongly opposed by the Kremlin until a few years ago.
      Kristovskis pointed to U.S. President George W. Bush's remarks at a November summit in Prague where Latvia's NATO entry accord was signed, that anyone who picked a NATO member, old or new, as its enemy would also be choosing the United States as its foe.
      "NATO membership is equal to territorial homeland security," the Latvian defence minister told the conference in Salen, a ski resort in central Sweden.
      Russia "has to come to the conclusion that the world is no longer based on large-power bi-polar Cold War relations, but rather on democratic values and international multipolarity," Kristovskis said.

      RIGA, Latvia (AP) — Latvia's translator-in-chief sits at his desk leafing through dog-eared French and English dictionaries trying to think of a Latvian word for "ombudsman."
      As chief terminologist at Latvia's Translation and Terminology Center, Peteris Udris is working to pull the country's language out of its Soviet-era hibernation into the age of free markets, open borders and modern technology.
      "For 50 years our language lived behind the Iron Curtain, away from English and we had no need to translate words we would never use," he said.
      Words like entrepreneur, franchise and bank overdraft.
      Driving the language's modernization is the nation of 2.5 million people's pending membership in the European Union. Joining the 15-member bloc will cap Latvia's struggle to reorient itself to the West and away from Russia.
      But first it has to translate reams of EU laws — 80,000 pages and counting -- from English and French into Latvian.
      The daunting task has translators in Latvia and the two other former Soviet Baltic countries, Estonia and Lithuania, scrambling to update and purify languages diluted by foreign invaders for centuries.
      English, piped into Latvians' homes on MTV, CNN and the Internet (or "Datortiklsinternet"), has trumped Russian as the latest threat to the Latvian language.
      A ponytailed 34-year-old, Udris taught himself English, German and French as the Soviet Union crumbled in the 1980s. He also dabbles in Swedish and Estonian and recently co-wrote a Latvian language textbook aimed at English speakers called "Do It in Latvian."
      So far he and the center's 57 other linguists and translators have come up with 51,000 new Latvian words.
      Each term has to get approval from a government commission and it takes an average of three years for people to begin using it regularly, said the center's director, Marta Jaksona.
      The center periodically sends out lists of new words to newspapers, hoping journalists will lead the way in incorporating the words into the Latvian lexicon.
      Jaksona sees the center's role as the front line in the battle to save Latvian, which many here had feared would die out during the Soviet period. Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Union during World War II and remained under its control until 1991.
      "We're not doing this just to enter the EU," she said. "It's very important to us that our language survives, and that will only happen if we help keep it modern, keep it alive."
      Latvia's government passed tough laws limiting the use of Russian on television and radio and linguists spent much of the 1990s replacing Russian words that infiltrated the language. Now they're taking on English.
      A few years ago, for example, they invented the word "dators" to replace "komputer," the unofficial word for "computer" used by most Latvians.
      Latvians now have words like "lasamatmina" — or reading toy — which replaced CD-ROM. An entrepreneur is now called a "uznemejs," or risk taker, instead of just an "entrpreneris."
      Often words are devised by combining existing words.
      But sometimes Udris rediscovers words — particularly legal terms -- that fell out of use during the communist era and don't appear in modern Latvian dictionaries.
      Most of the language's government and legal words were devised during the country's only other period of independence in its 850-year history -- the 23 years between the two world wars. Before the Soviets, the Germans, Swedes, Poles and Russians took turns ruling Latvia and diluting the language with foreign words.
      As Udris thumbs through his aging, yellowed copies of the Latvian Conversation Dictionary, a multiple volume encyclopedia of the Latvian language printed in the 1920s and 1930s, the old words get new life. But even that is limited.
      "As you can see it ends with volume 'T,'" he said.
      The Soviets halted publication of the dictionary before it was completed and just a few copies of those produced still exist. Language scholars hope to complete it and restart publication in coming months.
      Devising new fishing terms has proved a complicated task.
      Bordering the Baltic Sea, Latvia's modern fishing industry matured under Soviet rule and the language lacks words for the parts of modern ships, not to mention the names of fish from other parts of Europe.
      "Russians were brought in to do most of the fishing during the Soviet days because it was feared Latvians might try to escape on the boats," Udris said.
      He sheepishly acknowledges that some "Anglified" words are too entrenched to be pulled out of Latvians' vocabulary.
      Latvians, for example, will likely always ask for a "kompactdisk" and pay for it with a "kredit karte," he said.
      That also applies to ombudsman. After considering the Latvian word for mediator, a resigned Udris decided to lop off the word man and just settle for "ombuds."
      "It's a Swedish word anyway, so that's OK," he said.
      — — —
      On the Net:
      Latvian Translation and Terminology Center: http://www.ttc.lv

      VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — Lithuania's parliament has adopted a constitutional amendment that will drop nearly all restrictions on the sale of land to foreigners.
      The decision Thursday swept away one of the last remaining obstacles to the Baltic state's membership in the European Union.
      While Lithuania last month won a coveted invitation to join the powerful bloc, the EU also insisted the former Soviet republic follow through on commitments to grant non-citizens rights to buy land, including farmland.
      The amendment, passed by the Seimas legislature on a 116-4 vote -- four deputies abstained, will eliminate restrictions on the sale of farm land to foreigners seven years after Lithuania joins the EU, or by around 2011.
      The EU earlier agreed to the seven-year transitional period.
      Lithuania is slated to become an EU member in 2004, fulfilling a goal it set after it regained independence during the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. The other Baltic states, Estonia and Latvia, are also expected to join next year.
      The prohibition against selling land used for farming was written into the constitution, reflecting strong feelings in the nation of 3.5 million that only Lithuanians should own Lithuanian farmland.
      The sale of other types of land to foreigners was already allowed.
      The EU told Lithuania that a completely open real estate market was an important requirement for belonging to the 15-member bloc.
      Some Lithuanians also appear to have been swayed by the prospect of profiting from higher land prices.
      "Local farmers are willing to buy land cheaper and then to sell it later," said Ramunas Vilpisauskas, an analyst at the Free Market Institute in Vilnius, the capital. "For them, the transition period provides more time to buy land before it gets more expensive -- when the barriers are removed."

      RIGA, Latvia (AP) — Latvia's national airline, AirBaltic, plans to begin leasing Boeing 737s next month to replace its existing fleet, a move the fledgling regional carrier hopes will make it more competitive, a spokeswoman said Friday.
      AirBaltic wants to replace a 76-seat Avro RJ70 on its daily Riga-to-Copenhagen route with a 120-seat Boeing 737, said spokeswoman Vija Dzerve. It hopes to replace the remaining six planes in its fleet -- three Avro RJ 70s and four 46-seat Fokker 50s -- by 2004.
      "The market is growing and we're planning to offer new services," said Dzerve. "For that we need bigger planes."
      The state-owned carrier posted a 5 percent increase in passengers last year compared to 2001. It operates daily flights to Copenhagen, Helsinki and Stockholm. It also flies to Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Estonia and Lithuania.
      The airline is owned by Latvia's government, which has a 52.6 percent stake. Scandinavian Airlines System has a 47.2 percent stake, while Russian airline Transaero holds 0.2 percent.