The purpose of the article is to assess worldwide guidelines in a field of corporate governance of state owned enterprises, analyze Latvian corporate governance model, its past development and future perspectives, identify primary areas to be improved and provide practical suggestions for further actions. Analysis of the governance of the state owned enterprises in Latvia revealed that Latvian case only partly fulfills international guidelines. There is no common state assets governance strategy developed; therefore the decisions taken upon state owned enterprises are often based on immediate necessities. Although the legislation of the respective field is concentrated in a few comprehensive legal acts, still frequent amendments and wide possibilities of interpretation do not ensure fully adequate compliance with the legislation and reduce possibility for the enterprises to make long term plans. Significant part of the state owned enterprises by their juridical status do not fully correspond to the nature of their activities, and revision of the state owned enterprises list has been prolonged for several years, which is one of the main obstacles on a way to effective and transparent governance. Delegation of state capital holder function to the state secretary of the ministry might not ensure realization of state owner’s function in the most effective way, mostly due to significant work overload and different field of competence of the state secretary. Liquidation of the boards of the state owned enterprises possibly was not adequate decision, because it creates a distance between owner and management of the enterprise, thus making it difficult to reach such consensuses that would be beneficial for both parties. Availability of information about state owned enterprises is fragmentary, mostly in a form of different informative reports, however in recent year the quality and comprehensiveness of the information has started to improve. In order to ensure qualitative governance of state owned enterprises and its compliance with international guidelines, it is proposed to develop state assets governance strategy, which would be a base for any decision making on state owned enterprises. The proposal is made to unify owner’s function in separate institution, or at least strengthen respective units in the ministries, which are involved in the governance of the state enterprises in particular industry. In a field of information availability it is advised to prepare overviews of the state assets on regular basis, analyzing the information changes from year to year, and possibly involving the specialists from the private sector. With respect to the public availability of information, it is proposed to create special web page with elements of a database, thus promoting information transparency and possibilities of information analysis by different parameters.