One of Lithuania’s government ministers is facing scrutiny after it emerged she had family links to Foxpay, a fintech company that has won big state contracts. As financial authorities are looking into the company, the opposition is calling for a political enquiry.
Foxpay is a Lithuanian fintech company that offers online payment services. As an intermediary, it handles payments for 70 government and municipal authorities, with the largest flow of money going to the Tax Inspectorate account.
The intermediary is required so that people could make instant online payments for various government services, explains Arminas Rakauskas, deputy head of the Information Society Development Committee.
Foxpay has won many public procurement contracts, even though its rates are four and a half times what it claims to charge on the market.
According to the Information Society Development Committee, it was still the best offer from all the service providers that participated in the tender.
It turned out, however, that Foxpay used to employ Mindaugas Navickas, the husband of Lithuania’s Social Security Minister Monika Navickienė. He was the company’s employee in 2022 and later became its director.
Navickas only resigned once the central bank started an audit.
However, there are more links between the minister and the company. Foxpay is owned by Ieva Trinkūnaitė and her partner Vilhelmas Germanas, who has earlier convictions for financial crimes.
“Ieva Trinkūnaitė is the sister of my husband’s brother’s wife,” Minister Navickienė has admitted.
However, she claims that the last time she saw Trinkūnaitė and her entourage was a year ago. She was unaware of the circumstances published in the investigations by 15min.lt and Delfi.lt.
The prime minister has asked for explanations.
“I have received that information, I will assess it and then I will decide to what extent it might be a problem for the minister’s reputation,” Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė said on LRT TV on Monday.
Minister Navickienė, meanwhile, rejects any suspicions of corruption or that it may compromise her credibility.
“So far, I don’t see any risk of public and private interests [clash], or of public procurement itself, or even of the appearance that I might have confused my public and private interests at any point. That has never been the case and could never be the case,” she said.
Still, the opposition is now calling for a parliamentary inquiry.
“A political inquiry should be carried out because of the connection with the husband of the social security minister, Navickas,” said MP Algirdas Butkevičius, vice-chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Budget and Finance.
“We must have clarity as to whether any moral aspects have been violated,” he added.
The second inquiry, Butkevičius says, must not be political and carried out by the Committee on Budget and Finance.
After the prime minister said she had questions for the authorities about the Foxpay situation, the head of the Bank of Lithuania says he does not believe that the regulator did anything wrong when it allowed Trinkūnaitė to acquire Foxpay.
“We have considered all the information available to us at the time of that decision. And we have not found any grounds in the legislation for withholding our authorisation,” Gediminas Šimkus, the central bank’s chairman, said.
He hinted, however, that new details have emerged in the investigation into Foxpay’s activities and shareholders, but he would not say what they are.
Following media reports on Foxpay’s involvement in public procurement, the Prosecutor General instructed the Special Investigation Service to carry out a separate investigation.
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