British MPs were caught spending thousands on second homes, bath plugs, light bulbs, and even a “duck island”. At the time of the post-financial crash austerity, it resulted in a wave of anger, landing nine politicians in prison. Now, a scandal of a similar scale has reached Lithuania.

It’s 2009 and world markets are dragged under by the financial collapse. Lehman Brothers has already gone down, some bankers will later reveal they had bought weapons, expecting a societal collapse.

In this brewing chaos, a journalist in the United Kingdom, one of the first places to herald the arrival of the crisis wave sweeping in from across the Atlantic, uncovers a scandal that will shake the foundations of British political life.

“The expenses scandal exposed a kind of wholesale wrongdoing. It wasn't about individuals, [...] it was the sense of a systemic rot that people were only just beginning to understand,” wrote Emily Maitlis, author of the BBC documentary Expenses: The Scandal That Changed Britain.

It all started when Heather Brooke, an investigative reporter, filed a freedom of information request to see how politicians were spending public money. The request was denied, leading to a five-year legal battle. In the process, the full files were leaked to the press.

At first, the MPs responded much like their counterparts would do in Lithuania over a decade later – saying they did everything according to the rules.

“[There was] a very kind of arrogant view of the incorruptibility of the British politician,” Brooke told LRT.lt. “And if there were expenses paid on private things, it would only be minor and of no importance and I shouldn't really look into it.”

“Obviously that totally changed when it all started to come out because everyone could see that it wasn't just like one bad apple,” she added.

The scandal touched all the major parties, revealing that more than half of all MPs, 381 in all, had over-claimed expenses. Soon, the resulting outcry would result in dozens of MPs and ministers stepping down, including the parliamentary speaker who was deemed responsible for overseeing the system that had allowed the abuse.

The drip-by-drip revelations by the Daily Telegraph showed lavish expenses that included one MP spending £12,951 on gardening, another splashing £7,000 on furniture, and one MP, infamously, spending £1,645 on a "floating duck island". All of this happened as people were losing their homes due to the financial collapse and the government cutting public spending to reduce the country’s deficit.

“It became such a big story because it was coming off the back of the financial crash,” said Brooke. “So everybody was in sort of dire financial straits and then they would read a story about how a rich politician was using their money, taxpayers’ money, to fund their second homes and to have a moat cleaned.”

A criminal investigation followed, leading to five MPs and two lords from the upper house being sentenced to terms ranging from six to 18 months in jail.

As some observers in the UK argue, it wiped away respect for the British political class. One reporter recalled how they would dress smartly and keep a polite distance and tone when interviewing the elites. After the scandal, all of that was gone.

“The respect seems to have drained away,” Steve Back, a photojournalist, said on a BBC radio programme. “Now they [the politicians] do as much as they can to keep their heads down, to hide.”

Arguably, Lithuania has seen its fair share of criminal charges within the political system - from “black accounting” of the Labour Party in 2006, to the country’s biggest corruption scandal centring around the Liberal Movement in 2016. The latter party is now in government, while the former has its members in the national and European parliaments.

Unlike British society, it seems, Lithuanians never harboured illusions about the political system being clean. To an extent, corruption was largely expected.

In early May, Laisvės TV in Lithuania began releasing expense reports of local politicians, showing they had claimed thousands in what appears as bogus travel costs, as well as spending not backed by receipts.

The ensuing crisis was dubbed the “receipts scandal” and touched all the dominant parties and their members, including a serving minister who was forced to resign. But some politicians waved away the accusations, saying they were merely part of a system.

“[Corruption] may be perceived to be more common here,” said Jogilė Ulinskaitė from Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science (TSPMI), who studied fringe and populist movements in Lithuania. However, the media storm surrounding the scandal may show that “there is a change in tolerance for a process that has been going on for 30 years, and maybe this is also a move forward”, she added.

“I wonder how much it will shake things up in society and [the question is] how much people will think that all politicians [have always been] dirty,” she added.

Unlike the expenses scandal in the UK, the “receipts scandal” in Lithuania centres on local municipalities, not the parliament, even if many MPs started from local politics and were potentially implicated in municipal corruption. Regardless, the shadow has been cast over the political system as a whole, not least because the largest party in the ruling coalition, the conservative Homeland Union (TS-LKD), ran on a transparency high horse.

“This scandal will clearly hurt the conservatives, because they have been the defenders of morality and they have been playing the [transparency] card very strongly,” said Ulinskaitė. “It has turned out that they are no different from the others.”

In Britain, the Conservative Party succeeded the labour government with a pledge to bring “radical transparency”, according to Brooke, the investigative journalist.

But now, they are themselves embroiled in corruption scandals – including awarding millions in questionable Covid contracts – that no longer cause political ruptures.

“Certainly everybody has big ideological promises when they're in the opposition about how much they want the public to have a right to know. And the real test is once you're in power, how much do you stand by those principles?” said Brooke.

Route for anti-establishment?

Emily Maitlis, the author of the BBC documentary, argued that the crisis brought Brexit and radicalisation of British politics, with the parliamentary fringe forces capitalising on the wave of complete disillusionment.

“One former MP – a proud Brexiteer – tells me he thinks it was the beginning of the moment the public turned their back on the political elite thinking they had all the answers,” wrote Maitlis.

According to Brooke, the investigative reporter, “the climate was really set for an opportunist like Boris Johnson, like Brexit people, to use”.

“A big majority of people in Britain were really frustrated with politics and were looking for something radically different,” she added.

Lithuania finds itself in an emotionally-charged atmosphere today as the UK did in 2009. There is economic uncertainty and instability following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, as well as a continuing political polarisation following the Covid pandemic.

Even if Vilnius decides not to hold a snap election, as announced by the conservatives, the country is due to go to the polls in 2024 for both the presidential and the parliamentary elections.

"If this wave theoretically wiped out the [affected] politicians, someone would have to replace them," said Saulius Spurga, associate professor at Mykolas Romeris University. "It is a shock for the whole political system and the traditional parties, and it is a chance for other political forces. The question is whether they will be able to take advantage of it, because there are no such indications so far."

Business as usual?

A decade on, research shows that the whole scandal may have indeed had a smaller effect on Britain than initially perceived – only several dozen implicated MPs lost their seats in the 2010 general election and it did not cause a sharp drop in political participation among the public.

“The suggested link between Brexit and elite (dis)trust is also often overstated,” wrote Nick Dickinson, teacher of UK politics at Oxford University. “Although low trust in politicians does correlate with a propensity to have voted Leave, the independent effect of this variable versus demographic factors, in particular education, and policy factors, in particular attitudes to immigration, is relatively modest.”

“Moreover, while some studies have found that low trust exacerbated some voters’ concerns about immigration, the main effect seems to derive from actual immigration flow on a local level,” he added. “Thus low trust in politicians cannot really be said to be at the fundamental root of Brexit either.”

Despite the seemingly different expectations from the political elites in Britain and Lithuania, both systems may survive the crisis equally unscathed. A recent OpenDemocracy investigation also revealed that British MPs continue invoicing lavish expenses, which resulted in little outcry.

"Corruption scandals do take place [in Lithuania], but nothing happens after – [the same] parties continue to be liked as before. It is good that the political elite will clean up a bit and start to think about what is allowed and what is not allowed, and the social norms will change a bit," said Ulinskaitė from TSPMI. "The fact that the political elite is shaking is already a good sign. The question is to what extent than cleaning up will take place."

Thus, the main question remains whether Lithuania can follow Britain in sentencing its politicians for fraud - if any is proven in the first place.

The only ones to serve time in the UK were convicted not for lavish expenses, but for fraudulent bookkeeping, for example, expensing mortgage payments on loans that had already been paid off.

In Lithuania, law enforcement is looking into cases of what appears to be fraudulent submission of receipts on travel costs. In one example, a politician purportedly travelled tens of thousands of kilometres during the Covid lockdown, while several others paid for different types of fuels using dozens of different bank cards. One politician, anonymous so far, already admitted to using bogus fuel receipts.

But being able to gain access to the records and take politicians to account is already a positive development, according to Brooke.

“I feel like it's quite a useful exercise because it really is just really a baseline level of democracy,” said Brooke. “It's quite a good Litmus test of democracy - how are your public officials spending public money? You can't really get more basic than that.”