Katrīna Iļjinska, advisor to Latvian Minister of Economics Viktors Valainis on topics of communication, has been dismissed from her post, as LETA was told by Iljinska.
She became the minister’s advisor on the 9th of September 2024.
Iljinska wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that Saturday, the 28th of December, is her last day at the Ministry of Economics because the minister fired her for a post on X. In it, Iljinska mentioned the shortcomings of the national communication guidelines.
This post also mentions the minister’s remark that Prime Minister Evika Siliņa (JV) perceived the aforementioned post from Iljinska as an attack on her and her team. “All of his [Valainis’] raised questions in the coalition have stopped and distrust is on a rise. “I believe this argument, because if the coalition is holding on to restrictions on freedom of speech rather than deeds, then of course every tweet can rock it,” Iljinska wrote.
In the LinkedIn social network, Iljinska mentioned about herself that she has worked in the communications sector since 2006, when she was the public relations specialist at “Admirāļu klubs”. Iljinska later worked as a journalist at BNS news portal, newspaper Dienas Bizness and Forbes Latvija. She then became the deputy editor-in-chief of Forbes Latvia and the head of Baltic editorial. Between 2014 and 2019 she was in charge of public communications of political party Harmony.
Information from LETA archive shows that in 2019 Iljinska returned to working at Forbes, which had just restored its presence in Latvia through cooperation with Iljinska’s owned “Business Magazine” LLC. Iljinska’s company continued publishing the magazine for five years, until the franchise license terms ran out.
This year, at the beginning of April, Iljinska’s company had a tax debt of EUR 69 700 administered by the State Revenue Service. At the beginning of June the debt had decreased to EUR 60 000. On the 9th of December, the debt once again reached nearly EUR 69 000, according to data from Firmas.lv.