RIGA - Prime Minister Einars Repse on Feb. 17 notified the parliamentary committee investigating his recent land deals that he would not cooperate, claiming that it is outside of the committee's area of jurisdiction and said he would not provide any information to it about his controversial real estate purchases.
Repse informed Eriks Jekabsons, who heads the committee, of his decision in a letter.
Hostility between Repse and Jekabsons, who is also leader of former coalition member Latvia's First Party, began when the latter called the prime minister a dictator on the eve of the country's EU referendum last September.
In his letter to the committee Repse wrote, "As prime minister and a state employee I have never had any land deals. In my private transactions I have in no way touched the state's assets nor the state's financial means, and this issue is not and cannot be in the jurisdiction of a parliamentarian investigative committee."
The outgoing prime minister also wrote that he has followed the law where it limits the types of financial deals he can participate in, adding that the transactions he did engage in were fully legal.
Repse also informed the committee that a full disclosure of his financial dealings would be published shortly in Latvijas Vestnesis, the official government newspaper.
In response Jekabsons said that Repse's actions once again showed that the outgoing prime minister "thinks nothing of Parliament."
Repse's acquisition of seven plots of land worth 350,000 lats (516,000 euros) first came under fire when the daily Diena ran a story claiming that he had received lower than normal interest rates from two local banks to finance the land acquisitions, something illegal for a public official.
Delna, the local chapter of the anticorruption NGO Transparen-cy International, wrote an open letter asking Latvia's Corruption Prevention and Control Bureau to review the real estate deals to remove any doubt of impropriety.
Experts stressed the need for complete transparency, calling for an investigation to avoid harming public support for anticorruption measures.
Subsequently, the bureau began to examine the land deals.
The current crisis in Parliament began when MPs of then coalition member Latvia's First Party signed on to a parliamentary investigation into the legality of the land deals.
Shortly afterward the prime minister fired his deputy, Ainars Slesers, who then quit the coalition, leaving the Cabinet in a minority position.
