Eligijus Masiulis, a former leader of the Liberal Movement party who has been convicted in a high-profile political corruption case, has sued Lithuania at the European Court of Human Rights arguing his rights were violated during the trial.
“Eligijus Masiulis confirms the fact that he has turned to the European Court of Human Rights,” the Lithuanian Prison Service told BNS on Friday.
The former politician said his lawyer Ruslan Boiko should be contacted regarding the content of the complaint.
Approached by BNS, however, the lawyer refrained from commenting, saying that he was not authorised to do so. “I am simply not authorised to comment further. If the person wanted to comment, he would comment himself,” Boiko said.
However, communication with Masulis is limited as he is serving a prison sentence in Kaunas since November 2023. BNS asked the Prison Service to allow direct contact with Masiulis and received the brief comment above.
Further reading
Ve.lt was the first to report about Masiulis’ ECHR complaint.
Masiulis maintains that he was denied a fair trial because two of the three judges of the Lithuanian Court of Appeal who heard the case were biased. Moreover, he claims that a sentence for the same offence was applied twice during the trial.
According to ve.lt, Masiulis claims in its appeal that some of the operational measures taken against him by the Lithuanian intelligence authorities were unlawful because they were not sanctioned by a court.
In November 2023, the Court of Appeal sentenced Masulis to five years and six months in prison and confiscated more than 240,000 euros from him. In October 2024, the Supreme Court upheld Masiulis’ conviction.
The so-called MG Baltic scandal broke out on May 12, 2016, after officers of the Special Investigation Service (STT) searched the home, workplace, and car of the then leader of the Liberal Movement Masiulis. During one of the searches, 242,000 euros were found in the politician’s possession.
The prosecutor then revealed that Masiulis may have received a bribe from Raimondas Kurlianskis, vice-president of MG Baltic. On the same day, Kurlianskis was detained.
MG Baltic, now called MG Group, is one of Lithuania’s largest business groups. Both Kurlianskis and the company were convicted of bribing politicians and political parties to push through favourable decisions in the parliament.
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