On 1 April 2010, the United States Department of Justice announced a settlement with Daimler AG of $185 million for paying bribes in Latvia and other countries.
Latvian authorities refuse to prosecute the bribe recipients and intermediaries.
The Latvian media refuses to mention Parex Bank in articles about the Daimler settlement even though Parex financed the transaction.
pdf snapshop:
link:
http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/April/10-crm-360.html
The following document contains some details from the United States Department of Justice case against Daimler AG, dated 22 March 2010.
Bribes to Russian officials went to Latvian bank accounts.
Shortly after the announcement of the Daimler settlement came an announcement that HP also paid bribes to Russian officials through a Latvian bank. Those bribes were paid to the Russian Prosecutors Office.
Nobody has been prosecuted anywhere for any of these crimes.
pdf snapshop:
link:
http://www.justice.gov/criminal/fraud/fcpa/cases/daimler/03-22-10daimlerrussia-info.pdf
This document from the United States Department of Justice indicates that a company paid bribes to Riga City politicians to sell buses in 2000.
The accusation must refer to the sale of buses from Solaris of Poland to Riga Transportation (formerly Imanta and Talava). The sale was financed by Parex Bank.
Nobody has been prosecuted. The names “Solaris” and “Parex” have been censored from all Latvian media articles on the subject. And, Solaris continues to sell buses to Riga now in 2012.
Interestingly, the Latvian media did determine that former Riga mayor Gundars Bojars must have been involved. Bojars’ involvement is not surprising since he was also involved in the notorious ”Baltic Kristina” deal with Parex. Nobody was prosecuted in that case, either.
Bojars is currently free and rich. He is cooperating with Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg to construct a new building for the Latvian State Revenue Service.
pdf snapshot:
link:
http://www.justice.gov/criminal/fraud/fcpa/cases/daimler/03-22-10daimlerag-info.pdf
Dienas Bizness is one of the oligarch-controlled newspapers in Latvia.
To the credit of DB, they did publish a story about John Christmas’ 2004/2005 whistleblowing against Parex Bank. However, they did not publish the story until 2007.
The story contains some details of the material fraud at Parex that related to the corrupt sale of buses from Solaris to Riga Transportation.
At the time of this story in 2007, Viktors Zakis was spokesperson for Parex. He is quoted in the article claiming, falsely, that Christmas’ whistleblowing was investigated and was not truthful. When Parex handed its liabilities to the Latvian taxpayers in 2008, Zakis became spokesperson for Riga Transportation.
When the United States Department of Justice confirmed that Christmas’ whistleblowing was truthful in its Daimler settlement announcement in 2010, the Latvian media went silent again. DB refused to link the 2007 story to the 2010 USDoJ announcement.
pdf snapshot from 18 March 2012:
link, if not yet censored by Latvian authorities:
http://www.db.lv/citas-zinas/vairakus-gadus-censas-pieradit-nelikumibas-parex-204411?cp=1
It is a great mystery why nobody in Latvia (new managers at Parex Bank, auditors at Ernst & Young and PWC, raters at Moodys and Fitch, Latvian regulators, Latvian law enforcement, etc.) is able to prove that Parex Bank committed a material fraud crime when financing the sale of buses from Solaris of Poland to Riga Transportation since the proof only takes a few minutes using numbers from Parex Bank and Riga Transportation annual reports.
This bus sale included kickbacks, according to the United States Department of Justice.
This is an email written by John Christmas explaining the proof.
Most likely, this loan is now owned by Parex’s so-called “good bank” successor – Citadele Bank. Obviously, Riga Transportation has no legal obligation to repay this loan and therefore Citadele should announce a 100% loss.
