Short answer
A debt date, judgment date and official-notice date describe different events and trigger different legal consequences. Under Latvia's Credit Information Bureau Law, the first payment-delay date helps govern when debt data may enter a bureau database and starts the ten-year outer retention clock. Payment, other extinction, or a qualifying transfer can start a separate five-year clock. The warning date, database insertion date, last-update date and dispute status must also be preserved.
A judgment date proves when the court issued that decision. It does not necessarily prove when the judgment became final, when the debt first arose, or whether it was later paid or reversed. That distinction matters because a debt confirmed by a judgment that has entered into force is a statutory inclusion route; the decision date alone is not enough.
An official-notice publication date can start a notice-specific deadline. In the selected Vēstnesis liquidation notice, creditors were invited to file claims within three months after publication. That date is neither the underlying debt date nor a court finding. A defensible credit-risk record therefore keeps event, evidence, legal-effect, publication and assessment dates separate and updates its interpretation as later events occur.
There is no single “debt date”
A credit relationship produces a sequence rather than one timestamp. Depending on the question, the relevant dates may include contract formation, disbursement, contractual due date, first missed payment, acceleration or termination, warning, assignment, payment, settlement, database insertion and correction.
Latvia's makes these distinctions operational. Section 11 allows debt information to be included through several routes. Under the warning-and-delay routes, at least 60 days must have elapsed from the first payment delay and at least 30 days from sending the warning. The debt must remain unpaid, and objections affect what the supplier must do and what the record must show. A final court or arbitral decision is a separate route.
Section 12 then requires a debt record to retain several dates, including:
pirmo maksājuma kavējuma dienu
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That is the first payment-delay date. The same provision requires the date of database inclusion, the last-update date and, when the debt no longer exists, the date and manner of extinction. It also requires information about written objections and whether a court is considering a dispute over existence or amount.
The result is a structured chronology. A missed payment may be old, a bureau entry recent, an objection current and a payment later still. Reporting only the oldest or newest date would hide the legal state of the record.
First delay and payment drive different retention clocks
Section 16 ties retention to particular events. For an unpaid debt, the bureau may retain debt information for ten years after the first payment-delay date. For a debt that is paid, extinguished on another legal basis, or assigned or otherwise transferred to a person outside the statutory user class, the rule is five years after that event, subject to the same ten-year outer cap from first delay.
The provision states the five-year event rule and outer boundary:
piecus gadus pēc parāda samaksas dienas ... bet ne ilgāk kā 10 gadus pēc pirmās maksājuma kavējuma dienas
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The earlier applicable deadline controls. But payment changes more than retention. The record must promptly stop presenting the amount as outstanding and show how and when the debt ended. A later deletion date does not justify a stale current-status field.
Public-register data follows another rule: the bureau may retain it only while necessary for the processing purpose and not beyond the time it remains available in the relevant register. An official publication cannot automatically be converted into permanent private history.
A judgment has its own chronology
The anonymised Daugavpils District Court judgment identified by ECLI:LV:DAUT:2022:1212.C12212022.3.S illustrates why a judgment date cannot replace the underlying event dates.
The court's decision is dated 12 December 2022. Its reasoning describes a much earlier sequence: an identity-registration transfer in May 2014; loan advances in February, March and April 2015; a contractual default-interest period from July 2015 to January 2016; a business transfer in September 2015; assignment to the claimant in September 2017; and notice to the debtor later that month.
The court found the evidence sufficient to establish the loan, disbursements, non-payment and assignment chain. It also stated the ordinary allocation of proof:
katrai pusei jāpierāda tie fakti, uz kuriem tā pamato savus prasījumus vai iebildumus
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In substance, each party must prove the facts on which its claims or objections rest. The judgment is evidence of adjudication on 12 December 2022. It does not relocate the first default to 2022.
Decision date is not automatically finality date
The fetched judgment allowed an appeal within 20 days and tied voluntary performance to the decision entering into force. The document does not, by its face, prove whether an appeal was filed or the exact finality date.
This matters for bureau inclusion. Section 11 refers to a debt confirmed by a court or arbitral decision that has entered into force. A field labeled decisionDate cannot safely stand in for that procedural status. A reporting workflow should collect, where relevant:
- court and exact ECLI or stable decision identifier;
- decision date;
- decision type and outcome;
- appeal availability and any filed appeal;
- finality or entry-into-force date and its evidence;
- later variation, reversal, settlement or execution; and
- which amounts and periods were actually adjudicated.
A judgment may also award interest until execution. That makes the execution or payment date relevant to the current balance. Treating the judgment amount as frozen forever would be as misleading as treating the judgment date as the original default date.
Publication starts a notice-specific clock
The separate Vēstnesis example, notice 2026/125.KM1, was published on 3 July 2026. It concerns biedrība “Mamskie budni,” registration number 40008253671, and announces termination of activities and commencement of liquidation.
The notice says:
Kreditori tiek aicināti pieteikt savus prasījumus trīs mēnešu laikā pēc paziņojuma publicēšanas
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Creditors are invited to file claims within three months after publication. Here the publication date starts the stated notice-response period. The notice does not prove that every creditor's debt arose on 3 July, that a court adjudicated any claim, or that liquidation was completed three months later.
The notice and the anonymised judgment are independent examples involving different subjects. They must not be linked merely because both concern debts. This is an important research control: temporal proximity or topical similarity does not establish identity.
Five date categories for credit-risk systems
A robust data model separates at least five categories:
An “as of” report should calculate the current state from these dates, not rank events merely by age. A recent judgment about an old default may strengthen proof without making the default recent. A recent notice may reveal a new insolvency or liquidation event without proving an old trade debt. A recent database refresh date says when Legalcode stored or updated a record, not when the legal event occurred.
Practical reporting rules
For every adverse event, a bureau or lender should ask:
- What precise event occurred, and which source proves it?
- Which date triggers the relevant statutory or procedural rule?
- Is the source recording an allegation, a filed claim, a judgment, a final judgment, or completed enforcement?
- Has a later payment, objection, appeal, reversal, assignment or correction changed the interpretation?
- Is the subject identity proven independently of name similarity?
- Was the governing law in force on the relevant event date, and has it since changed?
- Is the source still available, and is retention still necessary and permitted?
The output should preserve all material dates and explain their roles. Compressing them into a single event_date field makes legal and data-quality errors almost inevitable.
MCP source-quality findings
Production Search and Fetch returned the controlling law, exact judgment and exact notice. Latvian structural Fetch now selected 16.pants correctly using the lv-law-article-v1 parser. The original 106.pants failure in also now passes and has been recorded as a repaired regression.
The exact archive-number query C-2120-22 returned seven different decisions, confirming that this number is not globally unique. The MCP preserved distinct ECLIs and sourceRefs, so this is a research warning rather than a new defect.
The judgment still contains the portal-injected IP/timestamp footer tracked in , and Daugavpils tiesa remains misclassified as courtLevel: OTHER under . Vēstnesis notice-modeling limitations remain in . No distinct new issue was opened.
Conclusion
The legal meaning of a Latvian credit-risk event depends on which date answers which question. First delay can start inclusion and retention periods; payment changes status and may start a five-year period; judgment date records adjudication but not necessarily finality; publication can start a notice deadline; and a source snapshot limits what can be said as of the research date.
Keep those clocks separate, connect each to its authority, and update the interpretation when later events occur. That is the difference between a useful chronology and a misleading list of adverse dates.
Sources
This article provides general legal information, not advice for a specific matter. Laws, facts and procedural deadlines may change the result. Follow the linked primary sources and obtain local advice before acting.