The disclosure came on Monday, 26 October, when a parliamentary hearing examined how the government handled talks over a proposed €1.8 billion (about $2.1 billion) gas terminal. Passport receipts shown to the panel record handovers by 23 officials from three ministries between May and November 2024. The longest recorded hold lasted 47 days.
Emma Pärn, a former deputy foreign minister, told the hearing she gave her passport to a cabinet office after being told it was needed for a “travel pause” during sensitive negotiations. She said she kept asking when it would be returned. “Nobody could point to a rule, or even tell me who had the key,” she said.
A register of cancelled official travel, read into the hearing record, lists eight trips abandoned during the same period. Five involved meetings with European counterparts on energy policy. Former government clerk Daciana Parvu-Panait said she logged the passports and received no written instruction explaining the holds. “It was treated as routine, but it was not routine,” she told the panel.
The handover record
I was told the passport was safer in a drawer than in my hands.
Emma Pärn, former deputy foreign minister
The panel heard that former energy minister Feliks Bolvaris had asked senior staff to collect the passports while officials reviewed the gas project. Bolvaris, who appeared by video, said he wanted to prevent sensitive negotiating material from travelling outside the country, not to silence critics. He denied ordering anyone to surrender a passport and said staff had agreed to temporary storage.
But the travel register places the holds at the centre of a dispute over the terminal’s route and ownership. Three officials who surrendered passports had raised concerns about the project’s cost-sharing terms, the hearing was told; two later missed meetings where those terms were discussed. Pärn said she had planned to brief counterparts from Estonia and Lithuania before one of the meetings was cancelled.
Kartik Kara-Vasa, a constitutional lawyer who reviewed the hearing exhibits, said the distinction between a request and an order mattered little if officials believed refusal could damage their careers. He said the panel had not been shown any judicial order or written security assessment authorising the collection. “A passport is not a bargaining chip for a ministry,” he said.
Pressure behind the gas talks
Bolvaris said the project faced a narrow negotiating window and that the government had a duty to protect confidential material. He called the passport arrangement “an administrative mistake, not a political instrument” and said he had not seen the cancellation register before the hearing. The cabinet’s current spokesperson declined to say who approved the collection process.
The project was later scaled back, but the hearing has left officials asking whether the travel restrictions shaped the negotiations before that decision. The panel’s chair said it would seek testimony from the three ministries and publish its findings on 2 November. The cabinet has promised to end any passport-storage practice not required by law; Pärn said that promise came too late for the meetings she missed.
