The programme Nekā personīga reported on 18 October 2026 that construction debris from a multi-million-euro Augstsprieguma tīkls project is ending up at an illegal dump. This summer the state company opened a new dispatch centre, part of a quarter-wide renovation due to finish next year. The site has critical-infrastructure status, and the crew filmed rubble leaving the works.
Two and a half years ago Augstsprieguma tīkls signed a contract to rebuild its centre in Riga. On land beside Slāvu aplis, covering a whole block and co-financed by the European Recovery Fund, old buildings were to be demolished and new ones built for €44 million. A year ago, with the shareholder Ministry of Climate and Energy, a capsule was set in the dispatch-centre foundations. The building was opened this summer and received a Baltic award for the most sustainable project. Work continues elsewhere on the site, and several more buildings were recently taken down. The material counts as construction waste that must be sorted and sent for recycling or disposal.
On the morning of Tuesday 13 October a tipper left the site. The film crew followed it across the Southern Bridge toward Katlakalns. After about 15 minutes it entered a fenced property known as Jaunie Dzelzkalni, where there is a sauna, a hotel that has not been commissioned, and other buildings. The State Revenue Service has seized the property over unpaid taxes. Court materials say the murder of lawyer Mārtiņš Bunkus was planned there, that weapons and vehicles used in the crime were kept there, and that Viktors Krivošejs, convicted at first instance, practised shooting on the land.
The property belongs to A.V.V., a firm registered in the 1990s. Its founders were Aleksandrs Kiseļs, known as Kisa, Oļegs Smirnovs and Genādijs Vaļagins, known as Genič, described as criminal authorities in the Haritonovs group. Vaļagins is treated as the central organiser of the Bunkus murder. Four years ago he was shot in his car near a restaurant in Pļavnieki. Before that his share had been re-registered to Arkādijs Judins, described in court as Vaļagins’s driver. Judins was also detained in the case, though no charge was brought against him.
Piles of concrete blocks and other rubble are now visible. No sorting point or landfill is entered for the place in State Environmental Service registers. Farther in, the crew found heavy machinery and more debris, and the truck they followed unloaded there. The equipment on site indicates that rubble is being crushed.
A worker told the crew the place was not a dump and that metals were being removed, sorted and returned to Clean R. Asked where the debris came from, he said everything had been demolished on the spot and gathered across a 12-hectare area. He named his employer as FastMax, hired to demolish ruins and clear the land. The building-information system shows no building permit registered there. Satellite images from recent years and drone footage shot this week do not show buildings that have been taken down.
FastMax is a subcontractor on the Augstsprieguma tīkls project, hired to demolish old buildings and haul construction waste. General contractor Newcom Construction denies that any of the site’s construction waste could reach an illegal dump. Project manager Jānis Ozols said the company receives subcontractor reports, including certificates from Clean R and from APUS, the waste-flow accounting system, showing the date, the vehicle, the delivery point and the volume. He said demolition is nearing an end, so the subcontractor is taking back temporary materials that had been placed on the yard, which he offered as the explanation for the filmed trip. He said FastMax has a base in Rāmava, if he was not mistaken, where its machinery stands, and that it has supplied topsoil, crushed stone and crushed concrete for access roads so machines would not sink, then collects that material when the work finishes.
Photographs from the previous week, held by the programme, show rubble taken to the same property on other days as well, where it is most likely sorted and reusable material crushed. Kalvis Avotiņš, director of the State Environmental Service’s Greater Riga regional board, said the piles are classic construction waste, not sorted: demolished material brought in and stacked, with very mixed fractions.
Augstsprieguma tīkls says Newcom Construction is responsible for proper waste handling and has submitted documents showing the waste was managed in line with the law. Under the contract, organising waste management and compliance is the contractor’s duty, and copies of documents certifying construction-waste management have been filed. Some demolition material can be reused as aggregate for roads and other work. The law allows it to be taken straight to a building site for crushing and reuse, but only if that is stated in the building permit. There is no building permit for the Katlakalns land.
The environmental service did not comment on this case, but said illegal construction-waste dumps exist alongside unregistered sorting and processing sites. Avotiņš said such places are set up without the required covering, yard, processing equipment or assessments of noise and dust, and that waste from different sites is gathered there to produce material while avoiding those costs. He named pollution as a main risk where surfaces are inadequate, because construction waste can contain chemicals and hazardous substances that leach into the ground. Insulation in Soviet-era buildings often contained asbestos, which is harmful to people and the environment. The risk, the report says, is that unofficial operators keep the valuable fractions and bury the rest. Mounds that have appeared inside the fence over the past couple of years could point to that.
On the Augstsprieguma tīkls site, more rubble was found than first estimated, including previously unknown buried structures, which an expert also checked. The state company pays for construction waste that is actually handed over and therefore sees no motive for builders or subcontractors to hide it illegally. That does not rule out selecting usable material and charging the rest to Augstsprieguma tīkls.
Guntars Levics, a board member of CleanR Grupa, said clients often hire a demolition firm without checking whether it holds the State Environmental Service permit to handle construction waste. Handing waste in is expensive, which creates a temptation to dump it. Wood can be accepted free of charge, while brick and concrete cost €10–15 a tonne. Unsorted mixed waste, he said, can cost up to €120 a tonne to manage, while separating brick, timber and other fractions into different piles can cut the cost by about ten times.
The service is urging legal changes so that large sites would need an expert audit before demolition, making it possible to predict how much waste, and of what kind, will arise. Avotiņš said figures for construction projects and the waste-transport accounting system do not match, with substantial gaps, and that some material disappears along the way. The fine for a company that dumps construction waste illegally is €2,800. In especially brazen cases, continued offending can lead to confiscation of the firm’s vehicles, though that measure has never been used.