At the time when vacation period is reaching its peak, we are giving our latest office report issue for our members.

Updates on key activities

OECD-Latvia Assessment: Access to Justice

In the framework of the “OECD-Latvia Assessment on Access to Justice for Businesses and Inclusive Growth in Latvia”, the leader of the FICIL Tax Policy and Administration work group Baiba Strupiša and Executive Director of FICIL Marta Jaksona met with experts from OECD to provide FICIL views on the crucial problems for businesses in implementation of the commercial law and to analyse business’ legal and justice needs, pathways as well as legal and justice delivery mechanism. This was the first fact finding mission of OECD experts to Latvia; the assessment should be delivered by the end of 2018.


Rule of Law and Fighting Economic Crime

In the context of the ‘Rīdzene’ conversations that recently have been made public, in an open letter to the Prime Minister FICIL has emphasized once again the importance of the principles of rule of law, transparency and fair competition for every entrepreneur who carries out or plans to do business in Latvia. FICIL also stressed the importance of a proper action to investigate alleged actions and to further strengthen the capacity of law enforcement authorities to fight economic crimes.


Responsibility in the Construction Process

In heated debates the Ministry of Economy is trying to work out a new legislation for the Construction process. Currently, the issue of responsibility in the construction process is being discussed. The Ministry held two meetings in July; FICIL was represented by the leader of the Construction work group Ilze Kramiņa. If you do have an interest in the issue and want to have a say, please let us know your views at ficil@www.ficil.lv. The ministry has also announced the next meeting on Construction legislation that will take place on 3 August at 15:00 in the Ministry of Economy. Please let the FICIL office know, if you like to participate.


Protection of Intellectual Property

The FICIL IPP work group meeting takes place on 8 August at 16:00 venue kindly provided by Cobalt. The main point of the agenda is the Copyright Law, Chapter IV (Rights of an Author) and, in particular, Article 14. FICIL has repeatedly stressed the importance of eliminating legislative obstacles to the effective protection of intellectual property, including, limiting the authors’ rights to revoke work, in particular with regard to work in the software and audio-visual industry. This issue was recently discussed at the meeting with the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Economy and it was agreed that FICIL will work to formulate proposals to amend the law accordingly. Our proposal should be submitted by the end of August. You can still apply to participate at the meeting at ficil@www.ficil.lv.


Availability of Public Services in English

Openness of the business environment in Latvia is one of the FICIL’s priorities. Following the ideas promoted at the HC 2017, work has been continued regarding the availability of public services in English. Thanks to the work of experts from FICIL Investment protection and from Tax issues work groups, FICIL has submitted a concrete proposal to the Ministry of Economy regarding the services that according to business should be available as a priority in English (a big thank you to everyone who participated at the survey on availability of public services in English). You can find the report (in Latvian) here. The visual graphs on survey outcome can be accessed here.

If you were in vacation with no access to internet when the survey was active and didn’t manage to have a say, but really would like to, please let the FICIL Office know your views at ficil@www.ficil.lv.


FICIL webpage: updated

We hope that by now you have already noticed that FICIL webpage has been recently updated. The key goal is to make it more user friendly. There is now, for example, an activity calendar where you will see all the work group and other relevant meetings that have been scheduled. There is a separate section “Resources” where you will find all the research (not only Position Papers) and presentations that FICIL has. We are still fine tuning and updating the content of the webpage; in case you have any suggestions, please do let us know at ficil@ficl.lv

 

Sincerely Yours

FICIL office