The Seimas has approved amendments to the Law on Employment drafted by the Ministry of Economy and Innovation. In accordance with the new provisions, highly skilled biotechnology, engineering, IT and physical sciences’ specialists attracted from abroad, as well as companies employing them, will be allocated lump-sum payments.

President Gitanas Nausėda met with Karan Bhatia, Vice President of the US company Google, at the World Economic Forum in Davos to discuss its investments and activities in Lithuania and prospects for future cooperation.

Lithuania borrowed EUR 650 million in the international capital markets by issuing a 10-year Eurobond. The annual coupon was set at 2.125 per cent.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, President Gitanas Nausėda discussed Lithuania’s investment climate with Florence Verzelen, Executive Vice President of the French company Dassault Systemes, which is Europe’s second largest software development company and has its branch in Kaunas.

A delegation from the Internal Market Committee will travel to Silicon Valley to meet with leading tech companies including Google, Meta, Apple, Airbnb, eBay, Paypal and Uber.

The European Commission has today presented the REPowerEU Plan, its response to the hardships and global energy market disruption caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There is a double urgency to transform Europe's energy system: ending the EU's dependence on Russian fossil fuels, which are used as an economic and political weapon and cost European taxpayers nearly €100 billion per year, and tackling the climate crisis. By acting as a Union, Europe can phase out its dependency on Russian fossil fuels faster. 85% of Europeans believe that the EU should reduce its dependency on Russian gas and oil as soon as possible to support Ukraine. The measures in the REPowerEU Plan can respond to this ambition, through energy savings, diversification of energy supplies, and accelerated roll-out of renewable energy to replace fossil fuels in homes, industry and power generation.

In order to promote the continued successful growth of the country’s financial market, the Bank of Lithuania has entrusted development issues to a specialised Centre for Financial Market Development. It will look for ways to strengthen the existing financial market participants and attract new ones, promote sustainable FinTech development, implement capital market development measures.

On May 18-19, Minister of Transport and Communications Marius Skuodis will attend the Ministerial Session of the International Transport Forum (ITF) in Leipzig, Germany, which will focus on further assistance for Ukraine and reconstruction of its transport infrastructure, as well as on the development of transport innovation and diversification of global supply chains in the face of today’s climate change and security challenges.

In April this year, passenger and flight traffic continued to grow at all Lithuanian Airports. Compared to the same period last year, the total number of passengers increased sixfold and reached 447,000 last month, while the number of flights more than doubled as more than 4.3 thousand flights were handled in April.

MEPs are expected to back new rules for a global minimum corporate tax rate from 2023 during the plenary session on 18-19 May.