Doing the half-mother's work in Latvia??

Lattelekom and the Siamese sister of its half-mother TeliaSonera (that would be TeliaSonera in Finland) are working on a secretive project that could lead to a major outsourcing/nearsourcing of certain TeliaSonera business functions to Latvia.
According to one rumor, TeliaSonera is looking at what Tele2 did -- which was to start moving all billing operations for its 30 million European customers to Latvia. Billing may not be the exact process involved, but it is some back office routine that it would make sense to nearsource.
The project, which has been run as a pilot experiment, probably involving business process ourtsourcing subsidiary C1, has so far involved off-loading extra work from Finland (data entry and that kind of stuff) during peak periods to Latvia.
A final decision will be made in the early months of 2006 as to how to go further. The issue is sensitive because of union worries in Finland (where TeliaSonera is not doing well under market pressure).
Interestingly, this fits into the vision of some Lattelekom executives that much of TeliaSonera's backoffice work could be done in Latvia or the Baltics. Whatever happens to the never-ending story of TeliaSonera seranading the Latvian government to let it but Latvian Mobile Telephone and Lattelekom, in a few years we may see that TeliaSonera has operationally moved to Riga from Sweden, or at least placed some mission-critical operations here. That will be, hopefully, a pleasant surprise in 2010 for Telefonica Nordica, formerly known as...you guess :).