Police said Mārtiņš Bunkus was shot by two men as he drove through the suburbs of Riga in the early morning. His attackers escaped in a van which was later found abandoned and burned out.

“We think that it was a carefully planned murder … connected with the victim’s professional work. We think we are dealing here with organised crime,” Andrejs Grišins, a police official, told journalists. Bunkus had reported death threats to police in 2016, he added.

The killing casts a cloud over efforts by the former Soviet-ruled European Union state of 2 million people to fight corruption.

The governor of its central bank is being investigated by police for bribery and Latvia’s third-largest bank, ABLV, recently closed after it was accused by the United States of money laundering. Both the governor and bank deny wrongdoing.

Bunkus worked on the winding down of Trasta Komercbanka, a bank that lost its license in 2016 after it broke anti-money laundering and terror-financing rules, said one person with knowledge of the matter.

There is no suggestion his involvement with this process was connected with his murder.