The TV 3 channel on Sunday reported that Bertold Flick, the head of the Latvia’s own airline airBaltic made more than 300,000 lats last year. That’s about $600,000. The two people on the board made more than Ls 10,000 lats a month. It made people upset largely because, well, people get upset over large salaries here in general. But in this case, the company has finished a year with losses and this is an unheard of salary for the head of an airline on the Baltic market. The journalists made a point that since airBaltic is now a state-owned company, its books are supposed to be open to the public. Better yet, Flick is supposed to file a declaration of income with the tax service.
And the kicker came today. The state revenue service has launched an investigation into who leaked the information. I suppose for the state agency the most troublesome part is not that a head of a state company doesn’t want to disclose how much money he made, but that someone made that information public.