Agriculture, Financial Services, Latvia, Legislation, Markets and Companies

The state auditors found that no authority was monitoring compliance of farmers, who had received compensations for culling their pigs due to the infection, with the requirement about not keeping any pigs for at least a year after the incident. The auditors also found that in 17 cases the farmers had ignored this requirement, Ilva Liepina-Milzaraja, a spokeswoman for the State Audit Office, told LETA.

Also, there are no clear-cut criteria for paying compensations only to the farms that actually had suffered losses in relation to ACM. The state auditors discovered a pig farming business which had received a compensation of EUR 1.5 million or 99.7% of the total amount paid in compensations both for the pigs culled and pork that had been sold, thus receiving double revenue and closing the year with a profit of EUR 850,000, which is a fivefold increase year-on-year.

The Latvian Food and Veterinary Service had also made some blunders. Out of 22 vehicles purchased supposedly for ASF-related measures, such as inspecting pig farms and carrying bodies of dead wild boars, six ended up in the fleet of the central administration and were mostly used by officials to commute between home and office.

In addition, bonuses for work on ASF measures had been paid to the high-ranking administrative personnel, not the employees, who actually worked in the field.

Following the audit, the State Audit Office produced nine recommendations for the Agriculture Ministry to improve supervision over budget planning, including tightening internal control and increasing efficiency of financial management at the entities functioning under the ministry.