Lithuania was very pleased and grateful when Norwegian Telecom installed a satellite telephone station in the Lithuanian parliament, making it possible for Landsbergis to stay in touch with the world when the Soviets re-invaded Lithuania in 1991. But the country did little to hold on to Telenor and other Western investors. "We don’t need you," said former president Brazauskas.

Aage Myhre, Editor-in-Chief 

To attract more foreign investors is often held up as a good way for Lithuania to follow – in order to achieve a more viable development, raise living standards and develop a more democratic, less corrupt society. 

I began my personal efforts to assist Lithuania exactly 21 years ago, when Parliament President Vytautas Landsbergis announced that he would come to Oslo, on his first so-called official visit to a western country. I and a handful of others were ahead of his visit contacted by a presidential advisor and asked to put the best possible conditions for Landsbergis' visit to my home country Norway. That was how my long relationship to and with Lithuania started...

Landsbergis’ visit to Oslo became a great success and our group was therefore soon thereafter invited to visit Lithuania. 

One thing that we put the most of emphasis on, already when Landsbergis was in Oslo the summer of 1990 and during our group’s  initial visits to Lithuania, was to invite serious Western investors here.

Already during my very first visit here, in November 1990, we brought with us a representative of the governmental Norwegian oil company STATOIL, introducing the company to the Baltic States.

Just two years later STATOIL began developing the now well-known network of petrol stations across the Baltics and Poland. Our main contribution to STATOIL that time was to introduce them to representatives of governments, organizations and individuals we thought might be of help. The last substantial roles I had for the company was as an architect and facilitator of their offices here in Vilnius in the early 1990's, and to advise them when they later met on corruption and other problems. 

During my first visit to Vilnius I also negotiated a contract with Lithuania's communications minister, based on an agreement I had with the Norwegian Telecommunications Administration to provide a satellite telephone station as a gift to Lithuania, and to install it in the parliament here, Parliament President Vytautas Landsbergis had asked our group of ' Lithuania-helpers' about this support when he was on a visit to Norway the summer of 1990. 

Not long after this satellite telephone system turned out as very useful when Soviet troops re-invaded the Baltic States and cut all other calling options with foreign countries.

As a 'thank you for your help' the Norwegian Telecom was offered to create the first network for mobile phones here, but they rejected because they thought the market here was too small. They were also very tired of the treatments they were given by local bureaucrats.

I remember that this deeply disappointed me and Telecom's export director, who I worked closely with for the above mentioned satellite station in 1990-1991, and later on when we both tried to position the Norwegian company in the Baltics. 

During the years that followed, I invited and tried to set stage for a number of Western investors.  Some of them accepted, and some are still in full operation and business here today, very successfully! 

What I quickly discovered, already two decades ago, was the importance of having a good personal contact with representatives of those companies, speaking ‘their language’ and to help them with many different problems and challenges in this misguided country where Soviet laws, structures and modes of action was still largely in force, and corruption a very widespread phenomenon.

I also understood that it was very important to offer ‘concepts’ not just ‘projects’ and investment objects to new investors.

Unfortunately, I seldom saw true understanding and interest from the Lithuanian authorities during those years. Even the largest and most serious firms were most often met with a shrug. "What's in it for me personally," was the question that was often presented when we contacted representatives of local authorities and businesses. 

I will never forget when I in 1995 had lunch with Chicago’s largest builder, in the Neringa Restaurant here in Gedimino Avenue, a Lithuanian-American who had returned to Lithuania four years earlier, full of optimism and dreams of a restored home country. The day he left he told me: “Aage, let me tell you frankly that they have all cheated me. I invested into business, production, a hotel and more. But they all cheated me – from the highest of politicians to the simplest of workers. I am sick and tired of seeing how these people have ruined my homeland, and I’m now leaving it all behind. I will never again put foot on the soil of the country I dreamed of and supported for all my lifetime.”

I will also never forget that Lithuania's president and leader through much of the 1980s and 1990s, Algirdas Brazauskas, by then made ​​it clear that Lithuania did not need foreign investments.

"We have enough money in this country, among our own investors and companies. We simply need no foreigners here," he said… 

One could perhaps have thought that today's leaders would had learned, but the fact is that neither expatriates living here nor people within the country’s own diasporas around the world are much asked for help, advice or contributions. And when the authorities ask, they often ask the wrong people and institutions.

Let me, finally, also share with you a passage from Steven Levy’s book “How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives”.

President Brazauskas' attitude and the following description explains a lot about why both and Lithuania are still living in a European backwater. Another sad example of how little the leaders of these two countries understood by then – and very often also today...

Here’s what Steven Levy writes:
“Google also made a priority to build centers overseas. Not long after she found the location in Atlanta, Cathy Gordon went to Europe, where Google wanted to build a giant data center similar to the one in the United States. Google had studied the laws and business practices of every country and narrowed the field to a few that might be able to provide the power and water required, as well as a friendly governmental hand. Some of the proposed locations were predictable – Switzerland, Belgium, France – but a couple were not.

One of those were Latvia, which Gordon had never visited before. The Google team flew into a ramshackle little airport and met the economic development committee, a cadre of what seemed to be stereotypical Soviet bureaucrats. Their host escorted them to the potential data centre site, an abandoned Soviet minibus factory. The building was cavernous and gloomy. In the centre of the building was a giant pit, and Gordon could not help but wonder whether any bodies were quietly decomposing in the stew. The group went to the area where the power facilities were located, and it looked to Gordon like they were on an old horror movie set, a ‘Gulag Archipelago’ version of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. One of the hosts leaned over and spoke in a confidential whisper, heavy with Slavic accent. “Don’t go to near those things,” he said. “Basically we don’t know if they could kill you.”

“We eventually ended up doing a deal in Belgium,” says Gordon.