Latvian President Valdis Zatlers statement today in support of declassification comes as the Parex Bank nationalization process is recieving increasing public scrutiny for its secrecy.

RIGA — Latvian President Valdis Zatlers announced his support of publicizing the classified portions of the Parex Bank audit during a television interview in Riga this morning.

“The public is showing interest, especially recently, about the reasons the state had to take over Parex Bank, for adopting certain decisions. Therefore, making these documents confidential is unacceptable,” Zatlers said during an interview on the news show ”Good Morning, Latvia!”

Despite his presidential title, Zatlers cannot declassify the documents himself. Under Latvian law, the classification of government documents is administered by whichever branch authored them.

“The president can’t declassify the document because it’s not a document of the chancellery of the president. The author of the document classifies it and declassifies it,” Elina Lazdane, deputy head of president’s press office told Baltic Reports.

The State Audit Office is scheduled to release its Parex audit report on Thursday, but this will not include classified sections. Auditor General Inguna Sudraba told Baltic Reports that the State Audit Office agrees with the president but is barred from releasing the classified sections because only the Council of Ministers has the authority to declassify this information.

“The Cabinet, they decided how to takeover Parex on criteria requirements. In all these meetings, they went in secret. All agreements are secretive,” Sudraba said. “We’ve been working with these documents, but we can’t make them public. The Council of Ministers should go back and take out this secrecy and make these documents available for public use. We can only show it when the report is made public.”