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Parliament). 254 Aivars Freimanis, Director of the polling company Latvijas Fakti,
indicated that the activities of the First Baltic Channel had been decisive. 255
Latvian society directed great attention to the case of the hacking of Usakovs’s
email correspondence. This exposed his alleged reporting to the Russian
Embassy on event organization and aligning reporting on news stories with the
First Baltic Channel. 256 In November 2011 the web-portal kompramat.lv
published Usakovs’s correspondence with Alexander Khapilov, an official at the
Russian embassy who later had to leave Latvia suspected of espionage. 257
Usakovs stated that part of this correspondence was fake, without explaining
which part he was referring to. As of January 2013, the litigation process over
hacking and publishing Usakovs’s e-mail was still ongoing. In March 2012 the
journalist Leonids Jekabsons, who published Usakovs’s e-mail correspondence,
was attacked and hospitalized. The police investigation stated that the main
reason for this attack was likely to be Jekabsons’s professional activities, but the
investigation process has still not been completed. 258
4.4.2 The Influence of Russian Media Companies on Social and
Political Processes
Russian television channels in Latvia operate as both commercial enterprises,
which aim to raise revenue from the sale of advertising, and opinion leaders
among their audience. Russian channels offer a wide range of high-quality
entertainment programmes, which often out-compete the programmes on Latvian
channels. However, Russian channels are not just trying to entertain their
audience. They have tried to influence a specific event and process: the 2012
referendum on making Russian the second official language in Latvia.
Immediately after the referendum, in the spring of 2012, Latvian journalists and
security services underlined Russia’s possible connection to the financing of the
initiation of the referendum. On 19 February 2012, in the LTV1 broadcast “De
facto”, the Chief of the Security Police in Latvia, Janis Reiniks, said that the
origin of the funding for gathering signatures to initiate the referendum was
uncertain. Reiniks noted the support provided by Russian media for donations to
254 See The Central Election Commission of Latvia: Statistics, http://www.cvk.lv/cgibin/wdbcgiw/base/saeima9.GalRezS9.vis,
p. 3.
255
See http://www.arcis.lv/10_06r.html.
256 Jakobsons L., (2013): “The truth about Nils Usakovs”, May 30, IR,
https://www.ir.lv/2013/5/30/patiesiba-par-nilu-usakovu.
257 Blass R. (2013): “The case of Usakovs is going to the court this week2, 27 June, IR,
https://www.ir.lv/2013/6/27/usakova-e-pastu-publiskosanas-lietu-sonedel-nodod-tiesai.
258 See “Journalist Jekabsons is cooperating with police”, TVNET/ BNS, 19 July 2012,
http://www.tvnet.lv/zinas/kriminalzinas/429702-
uzbrukuma_cietusais_zurnalists_jakobsons_patlaban_sadarbojas_ar_policiju, last accessed on 12
January 2014.
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