While in the EU and overseas analysts groan, politicians moan – pandemic brought a devastating impact on the global economy. The losses forced to cut the budgets and abandon the projects, but reality set Latvian society in shock, discovering aback decisions worth tens, and even hundreds of million euro. At the time the many state economic sectors are suffering from the significant budget cuts, the number of controversial infrastructural projects turned back on a desk.
Like previously delayed Liepaja prison construction project valued about 140 million euro – suddenly has been decided to be revived urgently or creation of the concert hall in the green centre of Riga with a worth of more than 130 million euro on the site of a well-functioning business centre. Probably the old building requires demolition only due to leaders of the Latvian Communists use to sit there.
“Politicians don’t spare the money because in the walls of former Central Committee of the Latvian Communist party building are hidden documents compromising the current “power brokers” who changed their shoes on a fly from Communists to nationalists” – this is one of the jokes from social media.
Political observer Maris Zanders in Latvijas Avīze newspaper writes that “the Central Committee building, of course, can be demolished, but questions still will remain. Being more precise, it will require examining how the Latvians acted themselves during the “period of the occupation”.
Zanders notes that it is now convenient to consider that the Communist party had only newcomers. This assumption needed to avoid the responsibility for the period of “occupation”. However, this narrow approach to history does not only affect the past. Let us get back to the present and talk about the oddities in the distribution of state funding to businesses in distress due to the COVID-19 crisis.
LRU is closely following this topic in the run-up of the elections due to the series of corruption scandals in Riga City Council brought un-trust to the institution. Well, the allocation of funds during the COVID-19 once again highlights the assumption that corruption runs the show not only in the Riga City Council. Interesting opinion based on facts represents to this topic Reinis Zala on the portal Pietiek.com. The crisis had significant fluency for many business sectors, such as hotels and restaurants, tourism and entertainment. The state presented the bailout plan to support these businesses and their employees, promised downtime benefits of up to 700 euro each.
LRU warmly welcomes this decision is the right thing to do as other countries did. Reckon we look at the list of recipients of the help published on the Revenue website. There we can find several successful and wealthy enterprises always prided themselves of their excellent financial performance and growth their leaders boasted themselves in the public area, telling their “success stories”.
One of the recipients is LMT Retail & Logistics (gadget retailer), a subsidiary company of “Latvijas Mobilais Telefons” which had finished last year with a profit of almost 29 million euro. As it turned out, on May 22, LMT Retail & Logistics employees become a subject of allowance for downtime.
Does this telecommunications giant need to ask for state help while the Latvian government has not paid even a third part of the promised 700 million euro to its residents? Perhaps it was not required to spend money on megaprojects that do not bring profit, but, most likely, only satisfies the ambitions of several individuals. Definitely, telecommunications is not the industry that hit hardest by the crisis. Additionally, many questions raise the fact of an impressive amount of help received by a gambling business. For example, “Alfor” company employees owned by the racy millionaire Janis Zuzans, as well have received benefits on May 18. The gambling company in 2018 held the profit of 19 million euro (statistics for 2019 is not available yet).
There are no doubts that the current time perfectly suits for entrepreneurs to adjust themselves with the state and their employees, reducing their appetite a little at the expense of huge profits. Instead, Mr Zuzans is speaking publicly, and threatening does not support the art industry if unfavourable temporary regulation not accepted for his business. However, that is not all. For owners in the sector of quick loans, too, “difficult times” have come.
Pardon for the expression, but by deceiving people, they have earned millions, and now they demand allowance for downtime. What a surprise! Fast-loan giant “4finance LLC” in 2018 held the profit of 27 million euro. Nevertheless, its employees also received allowance on May 14. There was a time when the company supported various projects, positioning itself as a socially responsible company. There was a case, accurate.
There are many other impressive examples in this list and several other large companies like “Domenikss” operating massive profit, which requested state benefits for their employees.
The full list is here: https://www.vid.gov.lv/lv/statistika-3.
The LRU receives numerous notifications from the local places from the residents about intension to go again for a better share abroad. In the Riga City Council, LRU intends to force the officials to start “mistakes correction work” eventually.
