GallerySveiki, all!
We celebrate Latvia's, Estonia's, and Lithuania's (as a modern state) centenary, in this our first "mailer" issue of the year. And we're glad for our work behind the scenes to support a small part of this year's events in Latvia.
We've been busy on various projects for our web site. Our most recent "Center for Baltic Heritage" additions feature background on Latvian signs and photos of all 5,236 pairs of mittens knitted as souvenirs for the 2006 NATO summit in Rīga. LATVIANS.COM now features a cleaner, crisper, more consistent look, while under the covers we've enhanced our content manager code to allow us to expand our site's metadata to improve our Internet search engine rankings. But with over 1,000 text content pages, it will take quite a while before we work our way through that effort.
But to our mailer's return after another hiatus. It's more an announcement: We are piloting an automated daily Baltic news letter via paper.li which we will make available later this year. With the loss of topix.net for our news feeds, we are also contracting with Microsoft Azure for access to their news service. We hope to continue to be a valuable source for Baltic news, albeit without the personal touch with which we first launched our mailer in August, 1999.
IN WHAT WE EXPECT TO BE OUR LAST MANUAL EDITION, we looked to U.S. President Trump's just completed summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for this issue's theme. We wondered, are there any links between Latvia and North Korea? Allegedly, yes, one of money. We examine that North Korean link and money laundering, more generally, in the news.
In this issue:
Ar visu labu,
News
Latvia’s new anti-money laundering chief pledges to step up fight against financial crime
Latvia's third largest bank, ABLV, closed earlier this year after U.S. reports it was a money-laundering hub for North Korea. Ineta Znotiņa becomes the new head of Latvia's Control Department, the anti-money laundering agency. Znotiņa has demanded tighter reporting and increased autonomy:
“What we see now is a very large amount of reports which tend to be of very low quality. Either the banks have not understood what they have to report or they are inclined to observe the letter but not the spirit of the law.”
40% of the funds in Latvian banks are non-resident deposits, down from 50% in 2016.
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