LETA is the main

Latvia Latvia, officially the Republic of Latvia, is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is one of the three Baltic states, along with Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south. It borders Russia to the east and Belarus to t ...

news agency A news agency is an organization that gathers news reports and sells them to subscribing news organizations, such as newspapers, magazines and All-news radio, radio and News broadcasting, television Broadcasting, broadcasters. A news agency ma ...

. Its headquarters are in

Riga Riga ( ) is the capital, Primate city, primate, and List of cities and towns in Latvia, largest city of Latvia. Home to 591,882 inhabitants (as of 2025), the city accounts for a third of Latvia's total population. The population of Riga Planni ...

. It is owned by Estonian entrepreneur

Margus Linnamäe Margus may refer to: * Margus (name), Estonian given name * Margus (city), a former Roman city at the locality of modern Požarevac, Serbia * Margus River, the Roman name of Great Morava; see Battle of the Margus A battle is an occurrence of ...

through his company

Postimees Group List of legal entity types by country#Estonia, AS Postimees Grupp (also known in English as Postimees Group), formerly known as AS Postimees and AS Eesti Meedia, is an Estonian media holding company headquartered in Tallinn. The company is curre ...

History

It was founded as ''Latopress'' in 1919, soon after Latvia became independent; the name was changed to ''LTA'' the next year when the wire service was subordinated to the Latvian Telegraph Agency. The name ''LETA'' was only used occasionally during the interwar perio

In 1940, when Latvia was Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940, occupied by the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

, it became a subordinate agency of the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS), a status it would keep until Latvia regained independence in 1991. During the

occupation of Latvia by Nazi Germany The military occupation of Latvia by Nazi Germany was completed on 10 July 1941, by Germany's armed forces. Initially, the territory of Latvia was under the military administration of Army Group North, but on 25 July 1941, Latvia was in ...

, LETA was subordinated to the German DNB news agency. From 1971 it was known as ''Latinform''. On 31 May 1990, the Latvian government restored the name LETA and the news agency's independence from TASS. In 1997, LETA was put up for privatisation by the Latvian state. On 27 April 2011, the LETA website was defaced by an unknown hacker who claimed to be protesting commercially biased news sources. It was down for a few hours as was the LETA side project "nozare.lv" and others. In 2015, Estonian entrepreneur

's UP Invest acquired LETA, and placed it under media company Eesti Meedia (now known as

). The acquisition plan was first announced in August 2015. Eesti Meedia already owned rival news agency

Baltic News Service The Baltic News Service (BNS) is the largest news agency operating in the Baltic States. Founded in April 1990, by a group of students (the founding CEO was Allan Martinson), it sought to inform foreign correspondents in Moscow of developmen ...

(BNS), but the Linnamäe-owned media company sold BNS operations in Latvia (subsequently renamed Latvian News Service) and media monitoring service Mediju Monitorings to a third-party Estonian company named AMP Investeeringud on 31 August 2015. UP Invest has set up a subsidiary named Latvia Newsworks, which has been the owner of 99.66% stake in LETA since October 2015. The Competition Council of Latvia made a decision on 23 December 2015 that the deal would not impact competition, and approved the acquisition on 5 January 2016. Later, it was discovered that most employees of the Latvian News Service and Mediju Monitorings were transferred to LETA, but was not disclosed to the Latvian authorities at the time of the acquisition. On 18 January 2019, the Competition Council imposed a €32,200 fine on

MM Group MM or variants may refer to: Alphabets * Meitei Mayek or Meetei Mayek, the writing system of Meitei language Arts, entertainment, and media Music * ''MM'' (album), 1989, by Marisa Monte * Maelzel's metronome, a music marking * Marilyn Mans ...

(UP Invest's parent company).

References

External links

*
History of LETA
News agencies based in Latvia 1919 establishments in Latvia {{Service-corp-stub