Press release, 12 January 2018
The Seimas adopted an updated version of the Law on Enterprises and Facilities of Strategic Importance to National Security and Other Enterprises of Importance to Ensuring National Security (draft No XIIIP-885(2)). The Law was adopted by 81 votes in favour, with no votes against and 6 abstentions.
The adopted Law mainly seeks to ensure that enterprises, facilities, economic sectors, and property and territory of the protection zones of importance to national security are safeguarded from the risks to national security interests. The Law also aims to eliminate the causes and conditions of occurrence of the risks of this kind as well as to liberalise and make more effective the currently valid procedure of assessment of investors’ conformity to national security interests.
The Law establishes security measures, which, from the point of view of an investor, will determine a more flexible assessment procedure, with shorter deadlines and exceptions where prior checking will not be carried out.
To achieve extra protection of national security interests, the sector of military equipment was also added to the list of economic sectors of considerable strategic importance to national security in addition to the four that had previously been determined, namely, the sectors of energy, transport, information technologies and telecommunications, other high technologies, and finance and credit.
The Government will determine and specify which areas of economic activity exactly will be treated as parts of the said economic sectors.
Investors will be obliged to inform of the establishment of an enterprise or facility in an economic sector or protection zone of considerable strategic importance to national security or of acquiring of shares of facilities operated in the sector or protection zone of this kind.
The lists of enterprises and facilities of considerable importance to national security outlined in the annexes to the Law will be reviewed in accordance with the functions they carry out and the relevance of these functions to national security interests. The enterprises of considerable importance to national security are classified into three categories, which, depending on the size of shares held by the state in those enterprises, are subject to different regulation in the case of reorganisation, liquidation or other actions to be performed.
The Law will enter into force on 1 March 2018.
Saulė Eglė Trembo, Chief Specialist, Press Office, Information and Communication Department, tel. +370 5 239 6203, e-mail: egle.trembo@lrs.lt