Law enforcement detained Ieva Trinkūnaitė, a shareholder of the fintech company Foxpay, her partner Vilhelmas Germanas and Mindaugas Navickas, the husband of former social security minister Monika Navickienė, 15min.lt reported on Wednesday citing its sources.
“The Prosecutor General’s Office confirms that the pre-trial investigation related to the financial technology company Foxpay and its activities is currently undergoing the necessary procedural steps,” the Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement.
It declined to comment any further, saying it could compromise the investigation.
The pre-trial investigation is led by prosecutors of the General Prosecutor’s Office and carried out by the Financial Crime Investigation Service (FNTT) and the Special Investigation Service.
According to 15min.lt, more people have been detained in the case and investigators carried out searches in a number of places.
Rolandas Kiškis, the head of the (FNTT), told 15min.lt that he could neither confirm nor deny this information.
Foxpay, owned by Trinkūnaitė, has won a government contract to service payments to a number of government institutions. The company came to the public attention after an investigation by 15min.lt found out that her partner and father of her children, Vilhelmas Germanas (who has changed his name from Vilius Židelis), had a criminal record and was significantly involved in Foxpay and iSun, another fintech company owned by Trinkūnaitė.
Meanwhile, Navickas, a businessman and owner of an office building near Vilnius Airport, was planning to sell half of the shares in his company Litlab to Trinkūnaitė.
Navickas previously served on the board of Foxpay, and at the beginning of the year he was also the company’s CEO. Meanwhile, Germanas worked for Navickas’ company Litlab in 2023.
To make matters worse, it emerged that there were personal links between Trinkūnaitė and the then social security minister and Navickas’ spouse Monika Navickienė: she and her family took a trip with Trinkūnaitė and Germanas on their private jet to Dubai.
When this information came to light, Navickienė resigned from her post.
Further reading
Last May, the Government Commission for Strategic Enterprises decided that Trinkūnaitė did not meet national security criteria and therefore should be barred from certain business activities that are deemed consequential to national security. In June, the government affirmed the assessment.
Meanwhile, the central Bank of Lithuania audited Foxpay and restricted its activities in July, saying that Trinkūnaitė did not meet the good reputation requirements and that her partner Germanas, who had been convicted of financial crimes, was involved in the company’s activities. He is the co-founder of iSun, a Swiss-registered fintech company which is the direct owner of Foxpay.
Further reading
The central bank also restricted the company’s use of its payment system Centrolink in June, except for payments related to the public sector, a decision that Foxpay has appealed in court.
At the beginning of July, Trinkūnaitė sold 9 percent of Foxpay shares to Saulius Galatilčius, the company’s director, as well as to Narimantas Bloznelius and Georgis Kotominas, minority shareholders of BankingLab Holding, a company of the banking system and infrastructure services group BankingLab.
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