The Migration Department has said that its ongoing probe has found a number of Lithuanian citizens with family ties to individuals subject to EU sanctions.
Evelina Gudzinskaite, the department’s director, told BNS that she could not yet provide the exact number of such people in Lithuania.
“The investigation is not over yet, so I cannot say exactly how many,” she said.
The probe was launched after it emerged that two of Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich’s children, Anna and Arkady, hold Lithuanian passports and may have helped their father circumvent international sanctions.
According to Gudzinskaite, her department has to check thousands of people and plans to complete the work in January.
“We are testing automated solutions. We cannot conduct investigations for each case, but we have narrowed the scope of our probe and check the data available in our registries,” the director said.
“If we find that there are some links based on our registers, we will check those links,” she said.
According to the Interior Ministry, once the Migration Department has established how many relatives of EU-sanctioned persons have Lithuanian citizenship, other authorities will look into whether they are involved in schemes to circumvent the sanctions.
The ministry has also told BNS that legal amendments are currently being finalized to allow stripping people of Lithuanian citizenship acquired by descent.
Last year, the parliament amended the Law on Citizenship to allow depriving a dual citizen of their Lithuanian citizenship granted by way of exception if the person publicly expresses support for a state that poses a threat to Lithuania or its allies’ security interests.
The law has so far been applied once to revoke the Lithuanian citizenship of Margarita Drobiazko, a Russian ice dancer. A citizenship review process has been launched for Ilze Liepa, a Russian ballet dancer.
Among other things, the Interior Ministry has asked the State Security Department to check 800 foreign nationals granted Lithuanian citizenship by way of exception.
Source: BNS
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