The Migration Department has said that its ongoing probe has found a number of Lithuanian citizens with family ties to individuals who are subject to EU sanctions.
The department could not yet provide the exact number of such people in Lithuania.
“The investigation is ongoing, so I cannot say exactly how many,” Evelina Gudzinskaitė, head of the Migration Department, told BNS.
The probe was launched after it emerged that two children of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich hold Lithuanian passports and may have helped their father circumvent international sanctions.
According to Gudzinskaitė, the Migration Department is checking thousands of people and plans to complete the work in January.
“We are testing automated solutions. We cannot conduct investigations for each case, but we have narrowed the scope of our probe and check the data available in our registries,” she said.
“If we find that there are some links based on our registers, we check those links,” Gudzinskaitė added.
According to the Interior Ministry, once the Migration Department has established how many relatives of EU-sanctioned persons have Lithuanian citizenship, other authorities will look into whether they are involved in schemes to circumvent the sanctions.
The ministry has also told BNS that legal amendments are currently being finalised to allow stripping people of Lithuanian citizenship acquired by descent.
Last year, the parliament amended the Law on Citizenship to allow depriving a dual citizen of their Lithuanian citizenship granted by way of exception if the person publicly expresses support for a state that poses a threat to Lithuania or its allies’ security interests.
The law has so far been applied once to revoke the Lithuanian citizenship of Margarita Drobiazko, a Russian ice dancer. A citizenship review process has also been launched for Ilze Liepa, a Russian ballet dancer.
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