Latvian bailiff declares €727,000 income, prompting calls to overhaul fee system
Sworn bailiff Indra Andrejeva declared €727,037 in income from her practice last year — dozens of times the average Latvian salary. The report highlights systemic risks and proposes three steps to reform the sector.
A sworn bailiff in Latvia, Indra Andrejeva, declared €727,037 in income from commercial activity in her previous year’s official declaration, according to information obtained by Dienas Bizness. The sum represents practice revenue rather than a net salary, since office and staff costs must be covered from it. Still, the scale is striking. With the average gross monthly wage in Latvia at €1,815 in 2025, according to the Central Statistical Bureau, annual average earnings amount to just under €22,000. That means one official earned roughly 33 average annual salaries in a single year.
The publication argues that this is not a market achievement but the result of a system designed by the state. The number of bailiff posts and their districts is fixed by the authorities, fee scales are set by Cabinet regulations, and debtors have no choice but to use the service. In economic terms, a closed profession, state-administered pricing and a captive client amount to rent extraction.
Ministry of Justice data show that three quarters of enforcement cases involve amounts of only up to a few hundred euros. The big money, however, comes from rare large-scale cases — real estate, company assets, high-value recoveries — where a percentage fee based on the recovered sum can reach six figures. When there are few such lucrative objects and limited access to them, corruption risk is not theoretical but embedded.
Insolvency administrators operate under a mirror-image logic, according to the commentary. Latvia’s insolvency history already includes scandals that damaged the country’s image among investors. The recent Baltic case of dairy processor E-Piim is cited as an example, where administrator decisions determine how much value dairy farmers ultimately recover.
When a professional’s lifestyle is clearly inconsistent with declared income, the commentary adds, it is not just a tax authority issue but a question for the state system. A lack of transparency in access to valuable assets inevitably creates an invisible fee for getting to the asset, and money that looks entirely formal can become shadow-economy money in origin.
Three systemic steps are proposed: caps on fees and remuneration tied to actual work rather than asset value; random, automated and publicly traceable allocation of large cases in both enforcement and insolvency; and routine cross-checking of declarations against actual lifestyles. Every disproportionately paid euro in recovery or insolvency, the article concludes, is a euro that does not reach the real economy.
