LRT council to decide whether director committed violation

The council of Lithuania’s national broadcaster LRT will decide on Tuesday whether to find its director general, Monika Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė, responsible for failing to disclose information about people from whom the institution purchased services, LRT reported.

The council is considering her responsibility after the Prosecutor General’s Office found this summer that LRT had breached the principles of its operations and accountability, as well as the public’s right to know how public money is used, by failing to disclose its 2025 service-provider data earlier this year.

LRT council chairman Mindaugas Jurkynas told BNS that the council had a duty to establish who was responsible after prosecutors identified the violations.

However, Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė’s lawyer, Tomas Bagdanskis, previously told BNS that the prosecutors’ conclusion did not by itself mean the director general was responsible. He also said that the LRT council itself had participated in decisions not to publish the data.

Bagdanskis further argued that the council had not followed the procedure set out in labour law, under which a breach of official duties can be formally recognised within one month of being discovered.

According to BNS, the decision draft proposes finding Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė responsible for an ordinary, rather than a serious, breach. This would mean she could be dismissed only if she committed a second violation in a similar area within one year.

A new procedure for dismissing the LRT director general, adopted by the Seimas earlier this year, allows the director to be dismissed if a serious breach of official duties is established.

In a decision adopted this summer, the Prosecutor General’s Office instructed LRT to assess each case individually when supplier names are omitted from publicly available programme-purchasing reports, rather than automatically withholding them on data-protection grounds. Prosecutors said LRT had decided not to disclose information about all suppliers without assessing each individual purchase.

After considering the prosecutors’ position, LRT revised its report on programme purchases for the previous year. The LRT council consists of 12 representatives delegated by the Seimas, the president and non-governmental organisations.