Decidability of Equational Theories of Coverings of Semigroup Varieties

For every proper semigroup variety X, there exists a semigroup variety Y satisfying the following three conditions: (1) Y covers X, (2) if X is finitely based then so is Y, and (3) the equational theory of X is decidable if and only if so is the equational theory of Y. If X is an arbitrary semigroup variety defined by identities depending on finitely many variables and such that all periodic groups of X are locally finite, then one of the following two conditions holds: (1) all nilsemigroups of X are locally finite and (2) X includes a subvariety Y whose equational theory is undecidable and which has infinitely many covering varieties with undecidable equational theories.