Šarūnas Stepukonis, a former partner at the BaltCap Infrastructure Fund, embezzled 40.4 million euros from the fund’s companies, the internal investigation revealed.
Stepukonis did not have any accomplices in the BaltCap team, the company said on Tuesday.
The investigation revealed that Stepukonis embezzled the money by creating and submitting large quantities of false and forged documents, as well as other possible criminal and irregular activities.
The embezzled money was channelled to gambling platforms, belonging to the Olympic Casino Group, and the Hungarian-registered securities trading platform Interactive Brokers.
The investigation also found that most activities related to the outflow of funds were executed in 2021–2023. No irregular activities were detected in the fund itself. The transactions took place in portfolio companies, including their subsidiaries, in Lithuania and Poland.
BaltCap’s managing partners Dagnis Dreimanis, Simonas Gustainis, Martin Kõdar, and Peeter Saks admitted that “the safeguards put in place in BaltCap did not fully render the protection they were meant to provide, especially in the portfolio companies and on their subsidiary levels”.
According to the partners, additional control measures were introduced in the companies immediately after suspicious transactions by Stepukonis came to light, and further steps will be taken to reinforce BaltCap’s risk management and financial controls.
Law-enforcement bodies are conducting two pre-trial investigations centering around Stepukonis.
He returned to Vilnius from Ukraine on February 10 and reported himself to the Financial Crime Investigation Service, where he was arrested. Two days later, the court issued a two-week arrest warrant for him, which was later extended for a month.
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