Court to rule on Kurlianskis parole appeal

The Kaunas Regional Court will rule on Thursday whether Raimondas Kurlianskis, convicted in the MG Baltic political corruption case, should be granted conditional release, LRT reports.

The Parole Commission rejected his request on June 17. His lawyer, Giedrius Danėlius, appealed the decision to the Kaunas District Court, which dismissed the appeal on July 28. The lawyer then appealed to the Regional Court.

Danėlius is asking the court to overturn the district court’s ruling and grant Kurlianskis conditional release.

Kurlianskis is serving a five-and-a-half-year prison sentence. This is his second attempt to secure early release. He became eligible for consideration last November, when nine months remained until he had served half of his sentence.

The Parole Commission rejected his first request, and district and regional courts dismissed his appeals earlier this year.

The courts have said that although Kurlianskis behaves appropriately while serving his sentence, works, maintains social ties and has been transferred to an open-type correctional facility, these circumstances alone are not enough to conclude that the aims of the sentence have been achieved.

The court has also assessed his involvement in the resocialisation process as insufficient and said his attitude towards the crimes committed remains formal, with a tendency to justify his conduct.

Danėlius told BNS on Wednesday that all the conditions for conditional release appeared to be in place. He said court decisions were often formulaic and noted that Kurlianskis’s risk of reoffending had remained consistently low.

Kurlianskis, a former vice-president of the MG Baltic conglomerate, was convicted of bribing politicians. He has been serving his sentence since late November 2023, when the Lithuanian Court of Appeal upheld his conviction while reducing his sentence by six months.

Former members of the Seimas Eligijus Masiulis and Vytautas Gapšys were also sentenced to prison for bribery in the same case, and courts have likewise refused to grant them conditional release. Former parliamentarians Šarūnas Gustainis and Gintaras Steponavičius, along with three legal entities, the Liberal Movement, the Labour Party and MG Group, were also convicted. They were fined a total of about 1.8 million euros.