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Estonia to repay Soviet-era debt to Latvia â€Ž

05 November 2010 09:12 (UTC +04:00)

Baku - APA-Economics. The agenda for the Governmentâ€™s Thursdayâ€™s meeting includes an item to allocate two million kroons from the Government reserves to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to pay back the loan received from the Latvian Republicâ€™s embassy in Washington in 1989, The Baltic Course reported.

According to the proposal, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would be allocated a total of 2,093,071 kroons in order to pay back the loan that Estoniaâ€™s Consulate General in New York received from Latviaâ€™s embassy in Washington in the year 1989.

The newspaper Eesti PÃ¤evaleht had published calls for Estonia to pay back the 20-year-old loan to Latvia in time for the latter countryâ€™s Independence Day that is on November 18.

Diplomat, linguist and literary author Aarand Roos who worked in New York as Estoniaâ€™s consul in New York during the years 1982-1995 described how the money deposited by the occupied Republic of Estonia in foreign banks had run out by the year 1990 and it had been impossible to draft budgets for the following year.

In his memoirs published in 1995, diplomat Ernst Jaakson described how he had been forced to turn to his Latvian colleague dr Anatol Dinbergs for help, receiving a loan of 185,000 dollars from the Republic of Latvia. According to Jaakson, Dinbergs had promised that no interest rate was to be paid on the loan.