Viking River Cruises SA will receive a $15 million loan to purchase three ships, one for the Danube River, and two for the Volga River. One of the ships, the Viking Neptune, was christened early this month by its 'godmother,' Noreen Doyle, EBRD Deputy Vice-President in Mainz, Germany.

"These ships should draw tourists to some of Europe's most gorgeous river scenery and captivating port cities," Doyle said. "That can only be good news for the Russian and Hungarian economies."

Her 'godchild' as she calls it, is the beneficiary of $9 million of the loan. The Viking Hungarian subsidiary company used the money to buy the 114-meter, 150 passenger ship, which was built at the Merwede shipyard in the Netherlands. Its crew will be supplied and managed by Mahart, a Hungarian state-owned river shipping company. For now it will cruise the Danube from Amsterdam to Budapest, and eventually farther east, when the river is reopened to commercial traffic.

The Danube Basin is shared by 11 countries, and is one of the most polluted rivers in Europe. Over a year ago, massive cyanide spills from Romanian mines killed off all aquatic life in Hungary's Tisza river before continuing downstream into the Danube.

As recently as the early 1970s, sturgeon, the famous caviar-fish that reaches lengths of up to 24-feet, used to clog the 10 mile stretch of the Danube river between Budapest and Szentendre.

Sturgeon are now in danger of extinction as dams like the Gabcikovo on the Hungarian Slovakian border prevent, not only migration of fish, but also boat traffic. Hungary has taken Slovakia to International Court over what was once, in the Communist era, a joint hydro-electric project. But in the last decade Hungary pulled out of the project, while Slovakia went ahead and diverted the entire river into an artificial canal and away from a vast Hungarian wetland. The result has been a drop in Hungary's over-all water quality, and a suit alleging that Slovakia "stole" the river.

Nonetheless, the EBRD sees the river as a potential source of income for former Eastern Bloc countries. Potential revenues from tourism, they argue, are incentive to clean up the river. Unesco, in fact, has also started a Blue Danube Fund to help restore the historic river.

"The EBRD's involvement in this project is important because of the relative scarcity of long-term debt financing from commercial banks for river cruise activities," said a bank spokesman. "As the first EBRD shipping loan secured on Russian mortgages, the Viking loan should also serve to boost the confidence of potential foreign investors - and lenders - in such transactions"

The Volga river in Russia has a similar story to that of the Danube. It is considered one of the top five stressed river basins on earth by the World Commission on Water for the 21st Century.

The remaining $6 million in funds will be used to acquire and refurbish the 125-meter, 189-passenger MV Mikhail Lomonosov and another similar ship from the Russian Viking subsidiary next year. These ships will sail between Moscow and St. Petersburg on the Volga.

The ships will expand Viking's fleet to 28 Vessels. With the acquisition of a major German cruise operator, Koln-Dusseldorfer Deutsche Rheinschiffahrt AG, last year, Viking became the largest river cruise operator in Europe and one of the five largest in the world. The company, whose majority shareholders are Scandinavian, is incorporated in Luxembourg.