Garsų Pasaulis, one of Lithuania’s largest printing companies, has been declared unreliable by the State Security Department (VSD).
Following the VSD decision, the Identity Documents Personalisation Centre has terminated its passport production contract with the company, the Interior Ministry said in a press release on Wednesday.
Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė asked the VSD to reassess the reliability of Garsų Pasaulis in response to an investigative report by the 15min.lt news website suggesting that the company’s representatives might have ties to the Belarusian regime.
Following the termination of the contract, the ministry will initiate a new international procurement process for identity document forms, inviting bids from as many EU service providers as possible. So far, Garsų Pasaulis has often been the sole service provider in these tenders.
According to the ministry, the stock of forms produced by Garsų Pasaulis under the current contract will be sufficient to continue passport production until the end of the year when the new procurement process is expected to take place.
Garsų Pasaulis CEO Ana Janauskienė told BNS on Wednesday that the company plans to take legal action.
“We believe the VSD’s decision is unfounded; we’re consulting with lawyers to resolve this situation as quickly as possible,” she said. “We’re definitely planning to go to court.”
A journalistic investigation by 15min.lt and the Belarusian Investigation Center (BIC) revealed last spring that Garsų Pasaulis is linked to Viktor Shevtsov, dubbed Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s “wallet”, and the Lithuanian business of Belarus’ hologram monopoly Golograficheskaya Industriya.
In 2011, the company that owned Garsų Pasaulis established a joint venture in Lithuania, named GP Holographics, with Shevtsov and Golograficheskaya Industriya. In the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Garsų Pasaulis sold its shares in GP Holographics to Shevtsov through an intermediary in the summer of 2022.
This year, the EU has imposed sanctions on Shevtsov after it was confirmed that his hologram production business is benefiting from the Lukashenko regime.
The journalistic investigation revealed that Garsų Pasaulis and GP Holographics are still based in the same building in Vilnius, share the same contact information, and have the same administrator and accountant.
According to 15min.lt, since 2014, Garsu Pasaulis has won all three passport production contracts awarded by the Identity Documents Personalisation Centre. The contract won in 2022 was worth over 30 million euros.
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