Finance minister threatens lawmaker with lawsuit over lottery tax post

Finance Minister Taurimas Valys has threatened conservative lawmaker Mindaugas Lingė with legal action over a Facebook post criticising proposed changes to lottery taxation, LRT reported.

Lingė said he received a personal message from Valys demanding that he delete the post or face a lawsuit. “Delete that defamatory nonsense,” Valys wrote in one message published by Lingė on Saturday evening. “Otherwise, I will sue,” he wrote in another.

Valys was responding to a post Lingė published on Friday, in which the lawmaker described the Finance Ministry’s proposal to cut the tax rate for lottery organisers from 18% to 10% as “cynical and perhaps even corrupt”. Lingė said the change could create conditions for an €11 million loss to the state budget.

“Instead of publicly explaining properly why the finance minister decided to reduce taxes on lotteries and create conditions for €11 million in budget losses, he is writing evening messages demanding that I delete my post and is also threatening me with lawsuits,” Lingė wrote on Saturday, alongside screenshots of the messages.

In the messages, Valys cited a Criminal Code provision on criminal liability for publishing information that does not correspond to reality and harms a person’s honour and dignity, as well as the related civil liability. He also cited a provision of the Statute of the Seimas stating that a lawmaker’s legal immunity may be removed in cases involving defamation.

Lingė said the minister’s reaction had strengthened his suspicions that the ministry’s initiative was of questionable origin.

The Finance Ministry said on Friday that its proposed amendments to the Lottery and Gambling Tax Law and the Lottery Law would not change the overall tax burden on lottery organisers. Although the tax rate would fall to 10%, organisers would be required to allocate the remaining 8% of the nominal value of distributed tickets to charitable support.

According to the ministry, this would mean that some funds generated by lottery operations would be distributed directly for public benefit rather than through the state budget. The same arrangement had been in place previously, before the Seimas changed it in 2021. The 18% tax rate for lottery organisers took effect in 2023.