At the end of January, the Service announced that it would assess information about Ždanoka's possible cooperation with Russian special services. This week, the VDD confirmed to LETA that the service is currently continuing to assess Ždanoka's activities in criminal proceedings and that the criminal proceedings against Ždanoka were opened by the service on February 22.
In the interests of the investigation, the VDD did not comment further at this time.
Leaked emails show that Latvian MEP Ždanoka regularly reported to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) about her activities and asked for money to organize events at least since 2004, but she denies working with the Russian intelligence services and refers to her contacts as her youth friend, the Baltic Centre for Investigative Journalism "Re:Baltica" reported in January. The emails were leaked to the Russian investigative magazine "The Insider", which shared the information with "Re:Baltica", the Estonian portal "Delfi" and the Swedish newspaper "Expressen".
In her statement to the media, Ždanoka did not deny the authenticity of the emails, but stressed that she considered it unacceptable to comment on the content of personal documents obtained by hacking.
