Udre under fire over party funds

Date: 02/09/04

LATVIA'S European Commission nominee Ingrida Udre is mired in controversy over allegations of illegal donations to her party.

Court proceedings continue in Riga in a case taken by the Greens and Farmers' Union, which Udre, speaker of the national parliament, or Saeima, leads. It is contesting a 2003 claim by the national corruption prevention bureau that the party received _115,000 in "fictitious" donations.

According to the bureau, the donors named could not have afforded to make such sizeable contributions based on a scrutiny of their income declarations.

Opposition parties and non- governmental groups have criticized premier Indulis Emsis for removing Sandra Kalniete, the country's commissioner since May, in favour of his party colleague Udre.

Kalniete, then foreign minister, had been appointed by prime minister Einars Reipse earlier this year but he subsequently lost power to Emsis. Some critics felt her appointment was symbolic; born in Siberia, after her parents had been deported there under communist rule, she became a prominent figure in Latvia's independence movement in the late 1980s.

By contrast, many pundits believe Udre's appointment smacks of cronyism. "There has to be a clean and transparent system of political appointments," said Roberts Putnis from the Riga office of anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International. "Yet this nomination has been without any explanation or debate.

"Taken together with the allegations about party finances, this is a very serious problem."

Udre has also come under attack for her links to oil magnate Aivars Lembergs. These ties have been traced back to her previous work with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, when she audited some of Lembergs' firms. The mayor of oil port city Ventpils, Lembergs has been accused of using his leverage with government figures to benefit from energy privatization.

Two of the EU's other new member states also performed a U-turn on their nominees.

Hungary's ruling Socialist Party had initially stated that its commissioner since 1 May Péter Bálazs would remain in Brussels. But in early August, it announced that Foreign Minister László Kovács would instead be its representative. This prompted the opposition Fidesz party to claim that Prime Minister Péter Medgyessy was motivated mainly by a desire to have Kovács removed from domestic politics due to internal party matters. Medgyessy has since stepped down as prime minister

For the Czech Republic, meanwhile, Vladimir Spidla will take over from sitting commissioner Pavel Telicka. Spidla resigned as prime minister in late June after losing the support of his Social Democrat party.

But Stanislav Gross, his successor as premier, awarded Spidla a lucrative consolation prize by nominating him for a Commission post

Article discusses the replacement of their respective preliminary Commissioners by the three new Member States Latvia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Latvian nominee Ingrida Udre faces criticism over allegations of illegal donations to her party.