Latvija in brief - 2010-10-07

  • 2010-10-06

AirBaltic co-owner Bertolt Flick has rejected Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis’ (New Era) suggestion to make the airline’s shareholder agreement public, reports LETA. Under this agreement, the state of Latvia cannot make the document public without Flick’s consent. “Latvia’s taxpayers [who are the airline’s majority owner] undoubtedly have the right to know why the state, a majority shareholder, cannot properly manage its shares in airBaltic, and why the minority shareholder has been given unjustified remit,” stressed Dombrovskis. The state of Latvia holds a 52.6 percent interest in airBaltic, whereas Flick, through BAS, owns 47.2 percent.

Development of the first Latvian satellite ‘Venta-1’ will be completed at the end of this year or at the beginning of next year, with launch into orbit from a space center in India taking place in the third quarter of 2011, said Ventspils University College Rector Janis Vucans on Sept. 30, reports LETA. Ventspils University College in cooperation with Ventspils High Technology Park, Riga Technical University, University of Latvia, Bremen University and one of the largest European satellite manufacturing companies based in Germany are involved in this project. ‘Venta-1’ will be a logistics or automatic identification satellite. With the help of a small transmitter attached to a vehicle, the satellite will be able to give the vehicle owner its geographical coordinates, explain developers. Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Center, with its modernized infrastructure, will be used for communications with the satellite.

The prosecutor’s office has lost all information in a high-profile criminal case as a result of a computer crash, Prosecutor General Eriks Kalnmeiers said at a meeting of the Saeima Defense, Internal Affairs and Corruption Prevention Committee on Sept. 22, reports LETA. He said, though, that politicians were not involved in the criminal case in question. The committee members, blaming old technology on the disappearance act, expressed their indignation at the poor technical support at the prosecutor’s office, its obsolete computers and car pool. Kalnmeiers doesn’t deny that this was a major problem. 244 computers, some of which were manufactured back in 2001, need to be replaced, he said. These obsolete computers though cannot just be switched to computer systems that prosecutors use in their daily work, complained Kalnmeiers.