It's A Wild And Wonderful Life

But what's it all mean!?

A Pack Of Gifts Now

The ho ho horror!

Latvia Just As Corrupt As It Ever Was!

I get a good chuckle every year when the various corruption indexes come out which invariably show Latvia's standing improving somewhat from year to year. Anyone who lives here knows better. The latest;

Foodie Fraud: Latvian Restaurant Chain Suspected of Tax Sam


Latvia's Asian restaurant chain Gan Bei has been accused of cooking more than delicious stir fry.

Financial police arrested seven people on Wednesday, including the wife of a member of parliament, on suspicion of cooking the firms books in a scheme that allegedly benefited them US$ 870,000 a month.

The suspects were held in connection with tax fraud and a scheme to under report earnings. At least two other people were taken into custody.

Officers of the State Revenue Service (SRS) searched at least 30 locations including the offices of catering company Lade Ko, it's subsidiary Gan Bei, and an unidentified cash register manufacturer. Gan Bei, which serves Japanese, Indian and Thai-inspired cuisine has ten outlets in and around the capital Riga.

Kaspers Podins, chief of the SRS, said at a press briefing that the cash register company under investigation had offered software to it's clients that let them fake having lower amounts of money in the registers, allowing them to skim off the remainder. The suspects, he said, had kept some of the money for themselves and used the rest to pay employees under the table.

Police also received parliamentary approval to search the house of MP Sergejs Potapkins, whose wife Galina Karmaca is a co-owner of Lade Ko and is one of the arrestees. When asked about the case Potapkin complained of "political speculation."

SRS General Director Kaspirs Cerneckis said that evidence obtained in the investigation could result in further charges against other retail and service companies.

Lade Ko confirmed to LETA that all Gan Bei locations have now reopened.

The salient points here;

• a Seima MP possibly benefited from this scheme
• said MP's wife is deeply involved and arrested
• the scheme is well thought out & organized over time
• many ppl involved  from employees to cash register mfg

All the above as well as the statement, "... evidence obtained in the investigation could result in further charges against other retail and service companies.", would indicate that the SRS thinks that this type of scheme is a wide spread problem. Not knowing who the cash register mfg is makes it difficult to appraise how many tainted pieces of equipment there are but it would be irresponsible not to speculate. I suppose that a list of business's exists and a high profile take down is calculated to put the fear in anyone running the shady software so that they clean up and pay taxes as money into government coffers is the main thing here, not criminal prosecutions because you'd have to have your head in the sand to think that it's possible to push a successful criminal case through the useless and corrupt Latvian judicial system.

My interest in this is kind of personal, one of the accountants is my neighbour who I witnessed being taken away by the SRS on Wednesday morning after showing up at 7:15 am and staying for two hours. A nice enough person but knowing the rest of my neighbours as I do I feel sorry that this person is now in the belly of the beast. Illegal schemes are rampant here as the number of knowing participants in this one would indicate.