Latvian war on ss… (tax office VS online business)

In summer 2017 tax officials of small and relatively unsuccessful Eastern European country – Latvia, launched war on countries biggest online advertisement board “www.ss.lv” – local equivalent of Craigslist or Gumtree.

Interestingly this “war” was not shown on English-speaking media as it often happens with many failures of Eastern European politics and corruption related stories, so we thought we might shine some light of what happens behind the language barrier.

“ss.lv” was one of the first online advertisement boards in Latvia and undeniably most succesful of all times quickly becoming pretty much the one and only online place to go and sell everything – pretty much exactly as it was with Craigslist or Gumtree in their regions.

OK, so what is all this about essentially?

Early 2017 Latvian tax officials demanded owners of the online advertisement board “ss.lv” hand over ALL records of ALL advertisements placed on their website including IP adresses of every single individual and company who ever posted any advertisement on this website.

No matter what you were trying to sell – your old teddy bear or car, government of Latvia demanded to know all about your activity including your IP address as proof that you’re trying to sell something online.

Owners of “ss.lv” – Mr. Andrejs Kivackis and Mr. Juris Līnis refused to give government this information and started legal action against the country of Latvia and Latvian tax office in court.

Disregarding the fact of legal action being taken and court ruling in favor of owners of the online advertisement board Latvian government and Latvian tax office took down their website – “www.ss.lv”

To save their business owners quickly relocated and transferred their website to different domain name “www.ss.com“.

The same day they transferred their website to .com Latvian tax office proudly publicly announced that they will take that down as well, but so far they have not been able to.

Why should we care about this – it’s just some small Eastern European website isn’t it?

Well…, their recent annual turnaround has been more around 4 000 000 Eur and their annual profits are in average of 2 000 000 Eur, and they were able to pay for quite controversial domain name “ss.com” couple of million as we can guess from the rumors around the internet.

They are… well by the looks of it were… undisputed market leaders in their region – they are the very exact equivalent of Craigslist and Gumtree.

And most importantly they did not do anything illegal or criminal – advertisement board is a place for people to post their advertisements, they do not sell anything themselves…

The only thing they did – they stood up against government and refused to give government details about people using their website, and to be honest it’s mainly about IP address. Upon posting advertisement you do show your contact details the only thing that is not visible to general public and tax officials from quick look at the ad is just the IP address…

The main questions stays open…

• What would happen if US or UK government would demand Cragslist and Gumtree to hand over all records of all advertisements?
• Would Craigslist and Gumtree hand it all over without a question or would they stand up and protect their users?

Why are Latvian officials so desperately going after regular people selling their old junk online?

Well… to answer this we need to look deeper into Latvian economics, politics and history.

After Latvia gained independence for the 2nd time – after the collapse of USSR, they choose their way of building their country. Contrary to Estonians who choose to clean up all old KGB politicians from their politics, Latvians choose to give away most of the government assets to these ex KGBs and they basically became the new political elite of this Eastern European country.

While other Eastern European countries slowly but steadily made progress in healthcare reforms and built up their economies Latvia was pretty much standing still or making extremely slow progress while keeping and feeding the biggest bureaucracy apparatus in comparison to their GDP in Eastern Europe.

For example – Latvian tax office employs twice as many people as Estonian tax office, while Estonian economy is bigger and stronger than Latvian economy…

If you run country incorrectly for 20+ years while most of the people have been emigrating – leaving the country for decades and the only thing local political elite is doing is manufacturing fake success stories – one day you will simply run out of people and money to sustain this kind of system…

And it currently looks like proud arrogant fools running this country for the last decades have reached the bottom of the barrel attacking general public trying to sell their old junk online can only be described as scraping through the bottom of the barrels.

P.S. We perfectly understand that US and UK governments probably already have all the information from Craigslist ang Gumtree users anyhow… 🙂 but the saddest thing is that neither VICE or any other similar alternative media platform have looked at this… 😦