Warsaw - Poland's government signalled Wednesday that European Union officials have refused privatization plans for its ailing shipyards and said it would ask Brussels for an explanation. Finance Minister Aleksander Grad's remarks came amid media reports that European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes rejected the Polish plan at a meeting with Grad in Brussels on Tuesday.
In response, workers at the yards on Poland's Baltic coast - birthplace of the Solidarity trade union that helped bring down communism - threatened to hold strikes.
With 60,000 shipyard jobs at stake, EU approval for a rescue plan that avoids mass layoffs is a critical task for Prime Minister Donald Tusk's government.
The yards risk having to repay more than 2.3 billion euros (3.2 billion dollars) in government aid, which would likely bankrupt the facilities in Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin.
Grad stopped short of confirming the media reports, but accused Brussels of failing to show good will in solving the dispute.
"We cannot call the matter closed," he told a Warsaw news conference Wednesday.
He pressed Brussels to offer a detailed response by Friday to a shipyard rescue plan that Poland proposed last month.
In Brussels, a European Commission spokesman said no decision had been made on the plan.
Any decision will affect the yards at Szczecin and Gdynia, but not Gdansk, he said.
The European Commission - the EU's executive arm - had given Poland until September 12 to come up with plans to restructure and privatize the yards, extending a previous deadline that Warsaw failed to meet.
The EU has worked with Poland for four years to come up with a solution, and has said it had given Warsaw ample time.
Gdansk is especially emotional for Poles as the place where then Solidarity leader Lech Walesa rallied an anti-communist movement in the 1980s that led to democracy in Poland by the end of that decade.
