Correction. The article, and first-instance judge Jansons, leave the impression that money given to a private individual for lobbying cannot in principle constitute a bribe; this is incomplete. Section 323 of the Criminal Law provides that a bribe may be intended "for that public official or for any other person", so the destination of the money — a private individual — does not in itself exclude the elements of the offence; the decisive question remains whether the money was given to a public official (Magons) for the use of his functions. The article likewise does not mention that the appellate court imposed on Osinovskis, as an additional penalty, a three-year prohibition on participating in public procurement and confiscated the bribe itself in the amount of EUR 499,500 — this is significant, because the confiscation and the procurement ban depend on the finding of guilt, which has now been appealed. It should be formulated more precisely: the dispute is not about whether the money was transferred, but about whether the purpose of the transfer was the performance of Magons' official functions.
Osinovskis must pay the fine to the State within 30 days pursuant to Section 41 of the Criminal Law; the three-year procurement prohibition means that his enterprises will be unable to participate in public procurement for an extended period.
It may impose a sentence below the statutory minimum or apply another, milder type of penalty than that prescribed by law — Section 55 of the Criminal Law.
Uģis Magonis and Oļegs Osinovskis now await a decision by the Senate of the Supreme Court on whether to commence cassation proceedings at all — until then, the regional court's conviction has been neither upheld nor overturned. The reported fact is that the case reached the Senate in September 2026, but the composition of the court has not yet been determined; what is significant is that the prosecution did not challenge the judgment, so cassation is available only as a defence instrument. The direct legal question is whether, in cassation proceedings under the Criminal Procedure Law, the Senate will overturn the regional court's judgment or leave it in force, and whether the defence's contention that the right to completion of criminal proceedings within a reasonable time was not secured justifies its annulment. The regional court itself relied on that circumstance to apply the mitigation provided for in Section 55(1) of the Criminal Law: it may impose a sentence below the statutory minimum or apply another, milder type of penalty than that prescribed by law. Accordingly, instead of three years, Magonis was sentenced to two years and six months, while Osinovskis received a fine of approximately EUR 151,700 in place of imprisonment. The types and extent of penalties in this case are governed by Section 36 of the Criminal Law (principal penalties, including deprivation of liberty and a fine, as well as ancillary penalties — confiscation of property and restriction of rights), Section 41, and Section 290 of the Criminal Procedure Law on confiscation and recovery issues in the judgment.
The regional court imposed on Magonis deprivation of liberty for two years and six months with partial confiscation of property: a Mercedes Benz vehicle, more than EUR 800,000, and three wristwatches; Osinovskis was fined approximately EUR 151,700, with a three-year prohibition on participating in public procurement of the state, municipalities and their enterprises in any capacity as an ancillary penalty. Likewise, the bribe itself — EUR 499,500 — is subject to confiscation and transfer to the state budget, which corresponds to the issue mandated by Section 290 of the Criminal Procedure Law concerning the confiscation of the subject-matter of the criminal offence and of criminally acquired property. Enforcement of the confiscation will in practice take place through sworn bailiffs — Section 569 of the Criminal Procedure Law confers on them the competence to enforce both the confiscation of property as an ancillary penalty and the confiscation of criminally acquired property, as well as the recovery of the value of property where criminally acquired property has been commingled with lawfully obtained funds. Article 2 of the Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime obliges the State to ensure confiscation also where the value of the property merely corresponds to the value of the criminally derived proceeds — this is also the basis for confiscation of value in monetary form. Mitigation of the sentence is lawful only on the grounds of Section 55 of the Criminal Law: the court found that the person's right to completion of criminal proceedings within a reasonable time had not been observed (the case has been pending since the arrest in 2015, with the first-instance judgment delivered only on 21 January 2021). In cassation, the defence will most likely challenge both the finding of guilt and the proposition that the appellate court could convert an acquittal into a conviction at all; the Senate will decide which panel of judges will hear the case and whether to open cassation proceedings.
If the Senate commences cassation proceedings, it may leave the judgment in force, amend it, or annul it; the judgment enters into force and the confiscation, fine and procurement prohibition become enforceable.
Article 5(1) of the Administrative Liability Law defines an administrative offence as unlawful, culpable conduct for which liability is provided for in law or in regulations binding on municipalities, and the activities described in the report cannot be characterised as unlawful.
The penalised person or the victim may appeal the decision to a higher official or, in the absence of one, to the district (city) court (Article 166).
The individuals and institutions referred to in this report face no legal status in the form of penalties or coercive measures — they are operating in the political and budgetary planning arena. The factual core of the report is the wage lag in the cultural sector and a planned protest action in November, but nothing in the sources provided indicates that organising the protest, the trade union's proposals, or the participation of institutional heads therein would give rise to any of the penalties listed in Article 14 of the Administrative Liability Law. Article 5(1) of the Administrative Liability Law defines an administrative offence as unlawful, culpable conduct for which liability is provided for in law or in regulations binding on municipalities, and the activities described in the report — demands for higher remuneration, the preparation of trade union proposals, and the organisation of a protest action — cannot be characterised as unlawful. The only regulation visible in the sources that applies here as the foundation of the system is Article 2 of the Administrative Liability Law, which provides that the administrative liability system comprises regulatory enactments establishing offences, penalties, and procedure, and Article 3(1), which provides that specific offences are established by the laws governing the relevant sector — none of which is mentioned in this report as having been breached.
The application of norms to this situation begins with the question whether a rule of law prohibiting or restricting the described activities exists at all. Article 5(3) of the Administrative Liability Law provides that administrative liability arises only where criminal liability is not provided for the offence, but before that a rule of liability must exist in law or in regulations binding on municipalities — no such rule exists in the sources with respect to the protest, trade union activity, or wage demands. Article 19(1) of the Administrative Liability Law requires that a penalty be imposed within the framework laid down by law or binding regulations, and Article 14(2) states that deprivation of rights and prohibition of the exercise of rights are only supplementary penalties that may be provided for only by law — this means that any penalisation here would be possible solely on the basis of a specific statutory offence, which is absent from the report and the sources. The reference in the report to the strike by employees of the Milan opera house "La Scala" and the Latvian sector's choice "not to strike" is a factual, not a legal, circumstance: nothing in the sources provided establishes either the legal regulation of strikes or their limitations, so this aspect can only be noted as an organisational choice. Likewise, the participation of institutional heads in preparing the protest raises no issue of administrative liability on the basis of the sources, since Article 1 of the Administrative Liability Law identifies the purpose of the law as the protection of public administration and public order and the fair settlement of legal relations, not the allocation of responsibility for shaping remuneration policy. The budgetary demand — EUR 30 million for wage equalisation from next year — falls within the competence of policymakers, not the subjects of administrative proceedings, and the sources contain no norm subjecting this decision to any deadline or coercive regime. Case law is not provided in the sources; therefore no comparative case examples can be given here, and none may be invented.
The most realistic course of further developments is political rather than procedural: if the government and the next Minister for Culture do not adopt a decision on remuneration, the sector will continue holding public actions, but this will not trigger administrative offence proceedings unless some specific conduct falls within a specific statutory offence. If, however, the authorities were to find a punishable offence in any of the actions, the course of proceedings would be as follows:
In practical terms, this means that the principal risk for protest participants and employers is not penalisation, but rather that the demand will remain unfulfilled: the organisation itself acknowledges that the EUR 30 million demand is unrealistic, so the outcome will depend on budgetary planning decisions and public support, as the sociologist cited in the report indicates. Cultural institutions, in turn, will continue to face the risk of unfilled positions and staff attrition, which the sources describe as a problem of ensuring the sector's functions.
As Article 20 of the Law on Scientific Activity provides, the LZA is a derived public-law person with autonomous competence, whose rights and obligations are set out in its Charter, in this Law and in other laws, and whose Charter is approved by the Saeima.
The law adopted by the Saeima granting citizenship to Vishvanata has been declared invalid from the moment of its adoption; therefore, Vishvanata's legal situation has reverted to that existing before the law's adoption.
This report indicates that the President of the Latvian Academy of Sciences, Ojārs Kalviņš, personally — not on behalf of the Academy — provided a supporting recommendation for the grant of citizenship, but, after public criticism, withdrew it and is considering leaving his office. The legal situation here arises not in the sphere of criminal liability or administrative penalty, but in the sphere of reputation and internal accountability: the sources provided contain no norm that would render a personal letter of support a legally binding act or a statutorily prescribed examination procedure. Therefore, the principal practical question is a different one — who, and in what procedure, assesses the justification for the support provided, and whether the citizenship granted to Vishvanata, which the Saeima has already urgently declared invalid, is being re-assessed in accordance with the Citizenship Law, the application of which was confirmed in the reasoning of the Saeima committee.
Kalviņš states that any further action regarding leaving his office will be coordinated with a decision of the LZA General Assembly; this is consistent with the autonomous competence of the LZA entrenched in Article 20 of the Law on Scientific Activity, under which internal governance matters, including questions concerning elected offices, are resolved within the Academy's own institutions. The recommendation was prepared on the basis of information provided by the LZA's cooperation partner, SIA "LZA Ekonomikas institūts", concerning Vishvanata's academic education and publications — thus, the support was based on the processing of facts supplied by a third party, rather than on independent scientific expertise. In this context, Article 6 of the Law on Scientific Activity is material: it imposes on a scientist the general duty to ensure the objectivity of scientific research and to give opinions within the scope of his or her competence; if the information used in the opinion regarding publications and authorship proves to be false, this indicates not a criminal offence, but the quality of the fulfilment of professional responsibility. Doubts about the content of the publications and authorship, of which Kalviņš was informed only on 21 October, are in substance a matter of research ethics — Article 17(1)(6) of the Law on Scientific Activity (as amended) provides that the principles of research ethics and scientific debate are established in cooperation with the Latvian Academy of Sciences; accordingly, it is precisely the LZA, together with the Latvian Council of Science, that may initiate an ethics assessment. Kalviņš's admission that his personal opinion was formatted as an LZA document due to an electronic signature error also raises the question of the document's status: it was not issued within the Academy's collegial competence, and Kalviņš explains this by a technical error rather than by falsification of the Academy's position.
For Kalviņš, the nearest practical problem is not an external sanction but the LZA's internal procedure:
Under Article 24(1)(3) and Article 24(3) of the Citizenship Law, a decision on deprivation is adopted if no more than 10 years have passed since the acquisition of citizenship and the person does not become stateless.
Article 13(1) permits a person with "special merits for the benefit of Latvia" to be admitted to citizenship by a Saeima decision published in "Latvijas Vēstnesis".
Divja Višvanata, whose citizenship was granted by way of a Saeima decision on 15 October, has reverted to her previous legal status — that of an Indian citizen — because on 22 October the Saeima adopted a law declaring the earlier law null and void from the moment of its adoption. Thus, what occurred here was not an ordinary deprivation of citizenship, but the elimination, with retroactive force, of the legal basis for its grant, which strips her both of the rights of a citizen and of the validity of documents that rested on that citizenship. The direct legal question is twofold: whether, in granting citizenship under Article 13 of the Citizenship Law, the Saeima was obliged to verify the truthfulness of the merits, and whether revocation by means of a new law is a lawful route compared with the deprivation procedure provided for in Article 24 of the Citizenship Law. The basic norm is Article 13(1) of the Citizenship Law, which permits a person with "special merits for the benefit of Latvia" to be admitted to citizenship by a Saeima decision published in "Latvijas Vēstnesis", and exempts them from most of the conditions of Article 12. This route rests on a political assessment by the parliament rather than an administrative procedure, and therefore both the grant and its revocation are controlled by the Saeima itself as legislator.
Under Article 13(2), the person submits to the Saeima an application, an autobiography, and a declaration that no facts exist that would preclude citizenship; in the annotation, the committee found that "the responsible authorities hold no information on circumstances that, under the Citizenship Law, would preclude Višvanata from acquiring Latvian citizenship". This means that the depth of the verification depended on the non-contradiction of the documents submitted — the apostilled diploma, the list of publications, the University of California attestation; doubts about authorship of the publications, of which Kalviņš was informed on 21 October, enter the legal sphere only as a possible ground for questioning the merits, not as an automatic rule. Had it been established that the person, in declaring affiliation with citizenship or in acquiring it, "knowingly provided false information or concealed facts relating to the conditions for acquiring Latvian citizenship", the provisions of Article 24(1)(3) and Article 24(3) of the Citizenship Law would apply — a decision on deprivation may be adopted if no more than 10 years have passed since the acquisition of citizenship, and it need not be supported by information from state security institutions, unlike the other grounds. Under this procedure, the decision is adopted by the Cabinet of Ministers in a prescribed manner, and the person may contest and appeal it in accordance with the Administrative Procedure Law, but contestation does not suspend the operation of the decision. The decisive difference is that on this occasion the Saeima did not use the mechanism of Article 24, but adopted a new law declaring the earlier one null and void from the moment of its adoption — consequently, within the framework of the norms provided by the sources, no avenue of administrative appeal against the revocation itself is available to Višvanata. A material motive confirmed by the sources: deprivation under the Article 24 procedure is permissible only if the person does not become stateless; Višvanata remains an Indian citizen, so this obstacle would not impede a future deprivation application in her case either, were the provision of false information to be proven. Kalviņš's open letter reveals a further dimension — the recommendation was given as a personal opinion but formalised as a document of the Latvian Academy of Sciences, which raises an institutional reputation issue but, according to the sources provided, no normative consequence; the fate of his office depends on a decision of the LZA General Assembly.
The practical consequences for Višvanata:
For SIA "Dr. Vishys", these events have no direct citizenship-related consequences — the company's ownership and its lack of turnover (losses exceeding EUR 200,000) are matters of commercial law, not of citizenship law. For Kalviņš, the most significant forthcoming development is the decision of the LZA General Assembly on his office, which he himself has identified as decisive. Procedurally, it remains to be seen whether Saeima deputies or state security institutions will initiate a procedure by which the authenticity of the documents would be officially established.
Direct administration authorities must procure goods from the centralised institution where the contract price in the category is EUR 1,000 or more within 12 months, whereas for municipalities this threshold is EUR 10,000.
Where a supplier is unable, for reasons beyond its control, to obtain the label designated by the contracting authority, the contracting authority accepts other evidence, including the manufacturer's technical documentation.
The annual demand of Latvian school and kindergarten kitchens is approximately 30,500 tonnes of food, of which around 10,400 tonnes are still supplied by suppliers unaffiliated with local sources — and it is precisely this remaining share that constitutes a question of legal competitiveness, not an agricultural one. An BIO certificate does not in itself grant a newcomer access to the public market: the decision as to which bid prevails is determined by the technical specifications, selection criteria and contract award criteria established by the contracting authority, not by product quality in the abstract. The direct legal question is within what legal framework the contracting authority may, and may not, structure food procurement so as to make it accessible to a small organic producer. This framework is set by the Public Procurement Law and the Regulations on Public Electronic Procurement, while, as regards packaging, by Article 63 of Regulation (EU) 2025/40 of the European Parliament and of the Council (PPWR) on the minimum mandatory requirements for green public procurement.
The contracting authority's competence to determine what goes into the specifications is broad, but not unlimited. The technical specifications provision of the Public Procurement Law indicates that environmental protection requirements, climate change mitigation and adaptation requirements, packaging, labelling, production processes and methods at any stage of the product's life cycle may be included in supply specifications. It follows that the contracting authority may include the organic production method and traceability in the technical specifications as a characteristic of the goods — this is not a favour to a local producer, but a specification element permitted by law. On the question of labels, the law establishes five conditions, among which are:
Where a label meets these conditions but also includes requirements unrelated to the subject matter of the procurement, the contracting authority does not require compliance with the entire label, but refers only to the specific requirements of the label relevant to the subject matter. Where a supplier has been unable, for reasons beyond its control, to obtain the recognised label by the deadline for submission of tenders, the contracting authority accepts other evidence, including the manufacturer's technical documentation — this is precisely the mechanism that gives a small producer with an organic certificate but without the specific label an alternative route to demonstrating conformity. The choice of supply channel is constrained by the duty of the centralised procurement institution: direct administration authorities must procure goods and services from the institution designated by the Cabinet of Ministers or through it, where the contract price in the relevant category is EUR 1,000 or more within 12 months, whereas for municipalities and their authorities this threshold is EUR 10,000 or more. The exception is the case where an authority secures goods at a lower price — in which case it must, one working day before concluding the contract, record the price offered by the institution. This regime means that part of the food volume falls within the sphere of influence of the technical specifications of centralised procurement, where a small producer's influence on the content of the specifications is indirect. The formal framework of the procedure is also set by Article 39 of the Public Procurement Law: the contracting authority provides for the electronic submission of applications and tenders and uses electronic information systems available free of charge. The Regulations on Public Electronic Procurement give a supplier the right to obtain an e-identity, to access procurement procedures announced electronically, and to offer goods through the e-ordering subsystem; the producer's participation in the system therefore begins with registration and obtaining an e-identity. Access to information for the producer is statutorily secured at two levels: Article 18 of the Public Procurement Law obliges the contracting authority, within one month of the approval of the annual budget, to publish information on planned procurements, and the e-procurement regulations provide that information on procurements, amendments and concluded contracts published in the e-tendering subsystem is posted on the Latvian open data portal data.gov.lv. The division of procurement into lots, which would allow a vegetable grower to participate without an obligation to supply the full range, is a decision of the contracting authority. In the packaging dimension, Article 63 PPWR provides that the minimum mandatory requirements for green public procurement may take the form of technical specifications, selection criteria or contract performance conditions. The development of requirements is based on the value of the contracts, the contracting authorities' economic capacity to procure more sustainable packaging without disproportionate costs, the state of the market, and the impact on competition.
The status of the previous mandatory green public procurement requirements is changing: until a new sustainable food procurement system is in place, an organic producer's position is determined by each contracting authority's specifications, not by mandatory regulation.
The further course of developments supported by the sources is the adoption of the new sustainable food procurement system and the PPWR green procurement implementing acts; the monitoring point is the publication of Cabinet of Ministers regulations and implementing acts in the e-procurement system and on the data.gov.lv portal.