Garsų Pasaulis, a Lithuanian company that used to have links with an oligarch close to the Minsk regime, will produce alternative passports designed by the Belarusian opposition, the 15min news website reports on Thursday.
Mikita Zabuga, a Belarusian citizen who has asylum in Lithuania, suggested that the Belarusian opposition should work with Garsų Pasaulis, the news website writes.
Zabuga, one of the people behind the new Belarusian passport idea, used to work in the interior system in Minsk, was offered work for the Belarusian KGB, and owned shares in companies linked to the Astavyets nuclear power plant.
As previously reported by 15min, in 2011, the company that owned Garsų Pasaulis and Golograficheskaya Industriya, a hologram maker with a monopoly in Belarus, set up a joint company in Lithuania, GP Holographics, and it supplied Garsu Pasaulis with holographic film used in the production of third-party documents.
Viktor Shevtsov, dubbed as Belarusian the “wallet” of the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, is one of the shareholders of Golograficheskaya Industriya.
Ana Janauskienė, head of Garsų Pasaulis, told 15min that all ties with GP Holographics were severed in 2022 after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.
15min has found out that Garsų Pasaulis sold its shares in GP Holographics to Shevtsov via an intermediary. Nevertheless, Garsų Pasaulis and GP Holographics still share the same address in Vilnius and the same administrator and accountant.
Shevtsov now owns 70 percent of GP Holographics. Another 10 percent belong to Golograficheskaya Industriya, and its CEO Alexander Babarenko has a 15 percent stake.
The Belarusian opposition announced plans to create new documents for its citizens in the fall of 2023 after Belarus decided to no longer renew documents of citizens permanently residing abroad at its diplomatic missions.
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