PM sparks false claim over NGO meeting costs

Latvian Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs triggered weeks of controversy over funding for non-governmental organisations by repeating misleading and partly false claims about the cost of meetings, LSM’s Re:Check reported.

In the first half of July, a user on the X platform wrote that the State Chancellery paid 18,000 euros to organise each meeting of the Memorandum Council in the Cabinet of Ministers’ building. The post tagged Kulbergs, who is also an active X user.

A few days later, Kulbergs repeated the claim in his regular online report. He said the State Chancellery was billed 18,000 euros for each visit by the organisations represented on the council, or simply for sitting through a meeting.

He made the same statement on Latvian Television and in the morning programme of Latvian Radio, saying he found it strange that the State Chancellery was billed 18,000 euros for sitting through a meeting.

More than 20 years ago, the government signed a cooperation memorandum with NGOs to involve civil society in state decision-making. Almost 580 organisations have joined the memorandum so far.

A few years ago, a government led by New Unity decided through a competition to allocate 200,000 euros a year to the Latvian Civic Alliance, which practically ensures the cooperation. Preparing meetings of the Memorandum Council is one part of its work.

Re:Check asked Kulbergs’s press adviser, Elīna Šverna, where the prime minister had obtained the information that one meeting cost 18,000 euros. In a written response, she said that 11 meetings had initially been planned and that dividing the budget costs by the number of meetings produced a figure of 18,181 euros, which had also previously appeared in the public domain.

This suggests that the prime minister most likely took the figure from public information in which the 200,000-euro budget was divided by the number of meetings. However, the State Chancellery’s website contains the agreement with the Civic Alliance, which lists all the tasks assigned to it by the government.

For 200,000 euros a year, the alliance provides the functions of the Memorandum Council secretariat, organises working groups and brings in experts to examine problem issues.