Lembergs no match for British court

RIGA - The Riga Vidzeme District Court has recognized an English court decision to freeze assets of controversial Ventspils Mayor Aivars Lembergs (For Latvia and Ventspils) in the value of 135 million dollars, reports news agency LETA. The freeze applies to all of Lembergs’ assets, either in his name or not. The court order loses validity when Lembergs pays in a security deposit of 135 million dollars.

The High Court of England previously ordered Lembergs to pledge on a list of his assets. According to the court order, if Lembergs fails to do this, he may have to part from properties that he has said do not belong to him.
The ‘Seaside Mayor’ must publicly announce his assets in the so-called Latvijas Kugnieciba (Latvian Shipping Company) freight rates case, in which property of Olegs Stepanovs was initially seized. Now it is Lembergs properties’ turn.
The official list of Lembergs’ assets and properties is quite modest, according to his official declaration of income, but the Latvian Prosecutor General’s Office believes that the actual value of properties belonging to Lembergs’ family may be hundreds of millions of dollars.

Lembergs previously tried to avoid pledging by ‘falling ill’ initially and then by trying to convince the court, through his attorneys, that the international Vitol corporation’s claim against him was politically motivated and that the court did not have the right to make him pledge on his assets.

The High Court of England rejected these arguments from Lembergs’ defense as unfounded.
A TV broadcast previously reported that Lembergs’ statement in the High Court of England will have a significant impact on the proceedings against Lembergs in Latvia. If Lembergs admits that he has more properties and assets than he has declared, it will be easier for the Latvian Prosecutor’s Office to prove the charges against him.
Vitol Group, the owner of Ventspils Nafta, turned to the High Court of England claiming that 135 million dollars be seized from Lembergs, accusing him and his associates of stealing as much from Latvijas Kugnieciba, a subsidiary of Ventspils Nafta. To prove that Lembergs can pay this much, Vitol had submitted to the court a list of Lembergs’ properties, and he must now either pledge on his assets or publicly state that they are not his.

The English court decision is significant, as Latvia’s court system has been essentially ineffective in pursuing alleged corruption charges against highly-placed individuals such as Lembergs.

There are “highly influential persons in Latvia who are obstructing the democratic development of the country and are not interested in combating corruption,” former Prosecutor General Janis Maizitis said in an interview with Latvian Radio last month. The former prosecutor general said that the current situation in Latvia reminds him of the situation ten years ago. “‘At least now we have the Corruption Prevention Bureau (CPB). They are the force that is able to do something against corruption, but are falling back at the moment,” Maizitis said, who added that these influential persons are hindering the work of CPB.

“The most important and effective method is to give investigators, prosecutors and judges the chance to work and find out whether there are signs of corruption, instead of putting up obstacles that hinder these processes,” Maizitis said. He pointed out that one of the ways that these processes are influenced and slowed down is reduced financing, as well as open threats.
Maizitis remembers that from 2005, he himself felt the influence of persons not wishing him to move forward with cases against companies from Ventspils. The former prosecutor general avoided calling these influential persons oligarchs at the time, to avoid future court proceedings, but said that the most important thing for these persons was to stop investigations into specific affairs. “It is hard to stop an investigation process. Before some investigations were started, there were even public threats of violence,” Maizitis remembers.

Asked how investigators were threatened by these persons, Maizitis said that they were threatened with their future. “Almost all of our investigators have families and plans for the future,” he said.