European Parliament rejects immunity request from Uspaskich

  • 2011-12-07
  • By Rokas M. Tracevskis

CHARMING THE NATION: Viktor Uspaskich, dressed in Lithuanian national costume, presents his step dance during an LNK TV show.

VILNIUS - Next year will not be boring for Viktor Uspaskich, leader of the liberal center-left Labor Party and member of the European Parliament: he will probably participate in the forming of the ruling coalition, with a chance to become the new PM after the parliamentary elections in the fall of 2012. There is, though, the possibility that he may be forced to go to prison on the eve of these elections. On Dec. 1, the European Parliament rejected a request by Uspaskich to reinstate his parliamentary immunity against criminal proceedings in the Vilnius Regional Criminal Court over alleged false accounting offenses: 442 MEPs voted against parliamentary immunity for Uspaskich, while 127 MEPs voted for granting him such immunity and 41 abstained.

The Labor Party is the second most popular party in Lithuania now after another opposition party, the Social Democrats, according to a social poll conducted in November by Vilmorus on the order of the daily Lietuvos Rytas. Uspaskich is the fourth most popular politician in Lithuania after Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite, Parliament Chairwoman Irena Degutiene and Social Democratic Party leader Algirdas Butkevicius. Uspaskich is positively evaluated by 39.3 percent of Lithuanians, while 36.9 percent evaluated him negatively, according to the poll.

On Sept. 7, 2010, the European Parliament waived the parliamentary immunity of MEP Uspaskich, satisfying the appeal of the Lithuanian Prosecutor General’s Office. Uspaskich is a flamboyant (a Silvio Berlusconi-style lover of singing and dancing in public) millionaire businessman, though officially his business is owned by his wife Jolanta Blazyte. She is No. 48 on the pan-Baltic “Rockefellers” list of the Lithuanian magazine IQ The Economist. Blazyte’s wealth, due to the Vikonda concern, which is mostly involved in the food industry, is 176 million litas (51 million euros), according to the magazine. Uspaskich is also a former economy minister in a former Lithuanian center-left government which was led by Social Democrat PM Algirdas Brazauskas. Although relations between Brazauskas and Uspaskich were not very friendly: their political parties compete for the votes of a similar type of electorate, according to political observers.

Uspaskich is accused by Lithuanian prosecutors of having instructed some persons in his party to undertake ‘double’ bookkeeping for the Labor Party in 2004. The case was started when the Social Democrats were leading the Lithuanian government. Uspaskich is accused of having issued specific instructions that certain commercial and financial operations should be carried out without being recorded in the party’s accounts. The prosecutors suspect that the Labor Party could have failed to include on the books over 25 million litas in income, 23 million litas in expenditures and pay over four million litas in taxes. Uspaskich could face up to four years in prison. In 2006, Uspaskich was in Russia for a year, where he received political asylum. After returning to Lithuania in September 2007, he gained legal immunity after being elected to the Lithuanian parliament. In 2009, this richest Lithuanian politician gained further legal immunity after being elected to the European Parliament.

The second vote on Uspaskich’s immunity in the European Parliament was held due to the fact that Uspaskich, by pointing to recently published WikiLeaks information, had argued that his prosecution in Lithuania is politically motivated. According to WikiLeaks, Albinas Januska, former state secretary of the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, as well as one of the Social Democrat leaders, Gediminas Kirkilas, told the U.S. embassy in Vilnius that the Lithuanian political elite would like to get rid of Uspaskich by using the tax non-payment issue. The Lithuanian officials also allegedly had some suspicions that Uspaskich may be an agent of the Russian secret services, although they had no proof. Indeed, Uspaskich made his first millions in Lithuania by re-selling Gazprom gas, and this can automatically cause some grounds for suspicion.

On the eve of voting of Dec. 1, Uspaskich made a promotion among MEPs of a documentary film about himself. The film, titled Wikileaks and the Political Scandal, was made by Belgium-based Marcello Faraggi. Uspaskich says that he did not pay Faraggi for making this film. The film accuses the Lithuanian State Security Department of being biased in the case.
The WikiLeaks information convinced even such influential MEPs as Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian PM who currently is leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), which is the third largest political group in the European Parliament (Uspaskich is a member of ALDE), as well as Graham Watson, who is a Liberal MEP for southwest England and Gibraltar and who chaired ALDE from 2002-2009. Both expressed their suspicions that there is some political maneuvering behind the Uspaskich case.

“The Wiki-leaked (is that now officially a verb?) cables state that, in a conversation with U.S. officials, Foreign Ministry State Secretary Albinas Januska ‘claimed that the government of Lithuania (and, by extension, he himself) engineered the departure of Labor Party kingpin Viktor Uspaskich from Lithuania because of the latter’s ties to the Russian SVR [Foreign Intelligence Service].’ Uspaskich denies any such links and claims that the suspicion that he was a Russian spy was based solely on the fact that he is ethnically Russian and was born in Russia. As the American cables comment, ‘blaming the Russians is a familiar explanation whenever a prominent Lithuanian falls victim to scandal.’ Uspaskich was an easy target: a newcomer to the political scene and an ethnic Russian to boot. The cables also state ‘one potential source of instability remains - the PM’s party continues to seek to meddle in Labor’s internal politics in a risky gambit to reduce Uspaskich’s influence.’ The PM’s party, the Social Democrats, was a rival party to Labor and was losing ground to them in the polls,” Watson wrote in his opinion piece for euobserver.com of Oct. 7.

Uspaskich, unlike many Russian-origin political activists in Latvia or Estonia, has never complained in Lithuania about ethnic problems and has never criticized Lithuanian foreign policy or the dominant version of history in Lithuania.
“A U.S. embassy note confirms that the then-prime minister and leader of the Social Democrats, Algirdas Brazauskas, admitted, in a statement at Vilnius University: ‘an order was given to expel him [Uspaskich] from Lithuania. High-powered people did this. Through the prosecution, through the tax inspectorate.’ Regarding the accusations of financial mismanagement, Uspaskich points out that at no point did the Lithuanian government provide proof that Uspaskich himself instructed anyone to do anything illegal,” Watson wrote.

On Dec. 1, the European Parliament rejected Uspaskich’s claims, mostly with votes from its two biggest factions, the center-right People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and the center-left Socialists. There are 12 MEPs from Lithuania in the European Parliament. Only one Lithuanian MEP, Valdemar Tomasevski, leader of Lithuania’s Polish Electoral Action and member of the European Parliament’s Conservatives and Reformists group, expressed support for Uspaskich during the vote of Dec. 1. Uspaskich said no thanks in public to Tomasevski because it could be harmful for the Labor Party before  parliamentary elections - Tomasevski is the most unpopular politician in Lithuania according to the Vilmorus survey. Moscow-leaning Latvian MEPs, such as Alexander Mirsky, also expressed support for Uspaskich on Dec. 1 and also got no public thanks from Uspaskich, probably due to the same Lithuanian parliamentary elections-related reason.

Leonidas Donskis (he is a member of ALDE) criticized his political group’s colleagues for basing their judgments on “anecdotes” from WikiLeaks and for distrust  of the Lithuanian legal system. “I find it difficult to believe that we are sending a message that the separation of powers does not exist in Lithuania. To treat Lithuania like Ukraine or, worse, like Belarus, would be absurd. I am not going to support this ALDE position,” Donskis stated before the vote of Dec. 1. On his Web site he also wrote about his astonishment regarding the position of MEPs from such countries as Romania, expressing distrust in the Lithuanian legal system, although Lithuania, according to Donskis, is “the absolute West” in comparison to these countries.

Donskis is known in Lithuania as a critic of the clan of ‘statesmen,’ which was removed from power by Grybauskaite, as well as a critic of the Lithuanian State Security Department, but in the case of Uspaskich, he prefers to give the right for the court to decide on guilt. Donskis also contradicted the ‘Russian’ motives among Uspaskich’s defenders in the European Parliament. He criticized the charges against Lithuania of being Russophobic. According to Donskis, if this were true, Uspaskich would never have become the economy minister, and the Labor Party would never have become one of the most popular political parties in Lithuania.