He Captures The Castle

The joy of becoming president is etched on every pore

Of all the various scams that can take place with EU money, one of the commonest runs something like this:

1. Draw up grandiose plans to open a leisure complex in a beautiful location in the countryside. The complex will preferably include a luxuriously-appointed main building, several smaller guest houses, a few ponds, tennis courts and sundry other essentials.
2. Fill in the necessary forms to apply for EU co-funding. Make liberal mention of the jobs the leisure complex will provide, the money it wil bring into the rural economy and of course how it will help visitors and locals alike to become more familiar with each other, reinforcing “European-ness” etc. It helps at this stage if you have a contact or two in the food chain between applicants and deciders. In Latvia that’s not too problematic as it’s such a small place that quite possibly friends, friends of friends or family members will be involved somewhere along the way.
3. Hey presto, you’ve been accepted. Pass go and collect 50% of the costs of the project courtesy of the EU (including Latvian) taxpayer.
4. When the leisure complex is finshed, open for business. This does not necessarily mean you need to advertise, produce brochures or even put a “Welcome” sign outside. If you do put a sign outside for the photos you take to prove you are open for business, don’t be surprised if some miscreants come in the night and steal it. So don’t bother replacing it. Fly the EU flag though, just in case.
5. Wait six months or so, hoping no-one who’s got lost in the mist actually turns up to stay. If they do, say you are unfortunately fully booked.
6. Resign yourself to the fact that it just isn’t going to work out as a leisure complex. At this point you face a tough choice. Either a) leave it officially as a guest house with just your family living there, b) sell it to another company you own for a knock-down price or c) put it on the market at market value. Luckily, the fact that you only put in half of what it actually cost to construct should mean you can turn a handsome profit even in a depressed housing market.

It’s a simple enough scam, which probably explains why it is so common. In Cesis region, a part of Latvia which I know fairly well, there are at least four examples of this I could drive to within 20 minutes of each other. And there may be another that has recently come to light. According to a report by the excellent investigative journalist Ilze Nagla, newly-elected president Andris Berzins’ rather swanky country home – built with EU funds – is technically a guest house/leisure complex notable mainly for its lack of guests or even indications that it is a guest house.

Riga castle was also built using German money...

Berzins was asked about this at his post-election press conference and chose his words carefully when replying, insisting that “no rules were broken.” I’m sure he’s right, and that the rules were very, very carefully scrutinised to make sure they weren’t broken according to the letter of the law. The spirit of the law is something else.

I have a feeling this issue could be the one that ends up biting his backside even more than the tragi-comic manner in which he was elected.

Probably the best thing that can be said in Berzins’ defence – though it is rather a back-handed compliment – is that he didn’t look particularly interested in whether he became El Presidente or not. Some sort of enthusiasm or sense of emotion might have been nice, but he acted more in the manner of a diabetic who has just been told they get a complimentary bottle of cola with every large pizza ordered.

Berzins’ advisers shoud be telling him to sort out the housing issue at the earliest opportunity – and not just because he will soon be entitled to a nice seaside residence in Jurmala entirely at the taxpayers’ expense. Ironically, in this regard he could learn from his predecessor. When Valdis Zatlers came clean about the “envelope payments” he had accepted while working as a doctor, he was vilified. But it also meant that the beginning of his presidency was its lowest point and over the next four years his reputation climbed steadily, ending sky-high with his decision to dissolve the Saeima.

It would be hard for Berzins’ approval ratings to be any lower among everyone but his party pals (MP Iveta Grigule, who proposed him for the presidency acts like a bobbysoxer in the presence of Frank Sinatra when he’s in the room) so he would be well advised to make The House In The Country Scandal his own vrsion of the Brown Envelope Scandal.

A full explanation/admission is a must – otherwise every future meeting with EU colleagues will be just one journalist’s question away from embarrassment. And were he to say “The opportunity was there to work the system and I took it,” he might actually win a bit of respect from a large part of population which is forced to bend the rules just to survive rather than to make another fortune.

 

Every One A Winner

What better way to start the new year than with some harmless predictions?

As you know, Belarus staged (being the appropriate word) elections on December 19 that were – to put it as mildly as did the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – ‘flawed’.

Interestingly, the rigged, violent election that saw the incumbent crack down on dissent took place shortly after another rigged, violent election in Ivory Coast prompted immediate condemnation and swift sanctions from the European Union.

Despite the fact that Belarus is a much more immediate security concern, the EU’s response has been flimsier than Alexandr Lukashenka’s democratic credentials.

The slap-headed strongman decided not to renew the OSCE’s mandate to poke its nose into Belarus on December 31, and ordered that the organization’s office be shut down. Coincidentally, the very next day the chairmanship of the OSCE was taken over by neighbouring Lithuania for a year-long term.

So let’s take a guess what happens next…

1) Lithuania makes rebuilding relations with Belarus one of its priorities.

2) President Dalia Grybauskaite pays a visit to her pal Lukashenka to try to persuade him to re-open the OSCE office in Minsk. She and old Moustache Man get on like  a polling station on fire. Indeed after speaking with him last time, she somehow managed to accurately predict the outcome of the election months in advance (she said Lukashenka would get 75%, in the end he got 79%).

3) Lukashenka comes over all reasonable and decides to re-open the OSCE office, provided of course that the EU decides not to introduce any sanctions and contents itself with a bit of tut-tutting before continuing to invest in his crooked regime.

4) Lithuania gets a feather in its cap for sorting the whole thing out and gets to feel like it is important, which is a national obsession. Oh, and because no sanctions have been introduced, Venezuelan oil can flow through the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda unhindered.

5) Lithuania continues to act as Belarus’ mentor in Europe, pushing for visa-free regimes, the warming of relations and arguing – as Grybauskaite already has – that isolating Luka and his bully-boys will not produce results but rapprochement will.

6) Towards the end of the year, Lukashenka does something “nice” to end Lithuania’s OSCE stint on a high and rekindle the gullible eurocrats’ fantasies that he can negotiated out of office. Maybe he decides against building a nuke plant on the border or does something to piss off Russia.

So everyone wins. Except of course the people of Belarus who get shafted yet again, stuck with the tyrant, his Bobby Charlton haircut and his Tom Selleck moustache for another four years. After which he can play the whole game all over again, as with Ukraine heading the OSCE in 2013 (Ireland in 2012 has enough on its plate to bother much with he OSCE) he will find in President Viktor Yanukovich someone just as amenable as President Dalia Grybauskaite.

Like A Scurvy Politician

With a month to go until the Latvian general election, campaigning is finally starting to hot up. The green tick of Vienotiba and the claret roundel of Par Labu Laviju beckon from their offices in central Riga, while Saskanas Centrs’ prime ministerial candidate tries to grab a few headlines and the Green Farmers’ candidate simply writes his own in his personal newspaper.

On TV, LNT has finally produced a decent leadership debate show – imaginatively titled Leaders’ Debate. Each week the top candidates from each of Latvia’s five electoral regions take part in a tightly-regulated head-to-head. The shows are marathon enterprises, lasting three hours with participants standing at lecterns throughout, giving the initial impression that they are taking part in a spelling bee.

So far we’ve had two shows: last week from Zemgale and yesterday from Vidzeme, the Valmiera Drama Theatre to be precise, which is more used to staging the plays of Rainis and Shakespeare. Both shows started slowly but were compulsive viewing by the time they wrapped up shortly before midnight. Both also suggested a couple of interesting election trends.

Most striking was the performance of candidates from the ultra-nationalist Visu Latvijai! party which has teamed up with the marginally less radical TB/LNNK to offer a clearly right-wing option to voters. Visu Latvijai! has a questionable past with some people linked to the party coming out with appalling anti-semitic and homophobic statements but under the shrewd  leadership of Raivis Dzintars the party has managed to clean up its act – both literally and figuratively.

Following a strong performance from Imants Paradnieks in the first debate (spoiled only by his Man-from-Delmonte-meets-Al Capone white suit) Dzintars was the clear winner of the Vidzeme debate. Clean cut, smartly turned out and with his glasses lending him a handy air of intelligence, the youthful ‘Vadonis’ put on a very confident and genuinely impressive performance.

There was no great trick to his success but he seemed far more savvy than some of the veteran politicians h was lined up against. He spoke softly but clearly. He was concise in his answers, never getting cut off in mid-sentence like his rivals. He displayed some humour, employed some simple crowd-pleasing techniques such as thanking the audience for their interest, and came across as polite and well-mannered. In short, he looked like he had actually practised for a TV debate.

And like Paradnieks before him, he also showed he was ready to ask tough questions. Paradnieks went on the offensive against former PM and arch-oligarch Andris Skele – a man most Latvians love to hate – much to the latter’s obvious surprise and displeasure. Similarly Dzintars was not afraid to  go toe-to-toe with former President Ulmanis as well as his more predictable attacks against the Russia-friendly Saskanas Centrs and PCTVL candidates who to be fair did reasonable jobs of defending themselves in difficult circumstances.

Prime Minister Dombrovskis started slowly but improved as the show went on, delivering a few withering ripostes to Ulmanis’ criticisms and reminding everyone that it was largely his PLL gang that got the country into such a mess in the first place.

Despite the completely cynical way in which Ulmanis is using his name to bolster the claims of the oligarchs, it is almost possible to feel pity for him. Shaking noticeably as a result of Parkinson’s Disease, he did not look like a man prepared to slog it out in parliament for five years.

He fluffed his attempts at introducing some gravitas, and the PLL manifesto seemed to consist of promising everything (better roads, free school books, kindergarten places, cash for having kids) without ever saying where the money would come from. He even managed to claim personal responsibility for kicking the Soviets out – a somewhat dubious claim.

At various points Ulmanis was booed by the crowd and ended up – perhaps even more tellingly – being jeered. A few years ago it would be unthinkable that an ex-president with the Ulmanis name would end up being laughed at by the mild-mannered burghers of Valmiera. Just think how he would have gone down at the Glasgow Empire.

Such a tragi-comic fall from grace would probably make a suitable setting for a production of King Lear on the very same stage of the Valmiera Drama Theatre where the debate took place.