Cabinet appoints Kaspars Gorkšs to head State Chancellery

Latvia’s Cabinet on Tuesday appointed Kaspars Gorkšs as director of the State Chancellery, LSM reports. He previously led the Employers’ Confederation of Latvia and was captain of the national football team and president of the Latvian Football Federation.

Andris Bite, president of the Employers’ Confederation of Latvia, described Gorkšs as a professional who works systematically and in a structured way. Gorkšs was born in Riga on November 6, 1981, and studied law and political science. He will take on the state role after a career outside government.

Gorkšs played for Latvia’s national team from 2005 to 2017, serving as captain from 2010 to 2017. He began and ended his playing career with Latvian clubs, while his international club career started in Sweden in 2002. Its high point came with Reading in the 2012-13 season, when the club played in the English Premier League. He spent much of his time in England’s second tier, the Championship, also representing Blackpool, Queens Park Rangers and Wolverhampton Wanderers.

His last professional team was FK Auda, a Latvian first-league club. He retired from active football at the end of the 2018 season.

Gorkšs was elected president of the Latvian Football Federation in April 2018 after Guntis Indriksons resigned. Federation members voted to remove him in October 2019: 67 voted in favour and 60 abstained. A first attempt to remove him, in February that year, had failed. The demand for his resignation followed a prolonged conflict over the federation’s governance, rather than a single event.