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 through his company Postimees Group.

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, 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 Margus Linnamäe's UP Invest acquired LETA, and placed it under media company Eesti Meedia (now known as Postimees Group). The acquisition plan was first announced in August 2015. Eesti Meedia already owned rival news agency Baltic News Service (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 (UP Invest's parent company).

References

External links

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