Parliament committee has not started inquiry into Matjošaitytė

LRT, citing the ELTA news agency, reported that Lithuania’s parliamentary Committee on Legal Affairs and Law and Order has not yet begun an inquiry into whether current Central Electoral Commission member Laura Matjošaitytė advised the Nemunas Dawn party before the parliamentary elections.

Committee chairman Julius Sabatauskas said additional information was being collected at the request of Parliament Speaker Juozas Olekas.

“Facts are always collected first, institutional representatives are asked for their views, and only then is the matter considered. We cannot rush into the nettles,” Sabatauskas told ELTA.

He said he did not know how long the information-gathering process would take, but said the committee planned to contact Central Electoral Commission chairwoman Lina Petronienė and Bar Council chairman Mindaugas Kukaitis.

Sabatauskas also questioned whether his committee was the appropriate body to examine the matter, noting that Matjošaitytė is both a Central Electoral Commission member and a representative of the legal profession.

“The speaker asked us to examine the issue, but we have not started anything yet,” he said.

The Delfi news portal reported in late August that Matjošaitytė may have advised Nemunas Dawn and helped the party prepare a response to the Central Electoral Commission. According to the portal, she later became a commission member but did not publicly disclose the services she had provided to the party or recuse herself from considering related matters.

Asked whether the party had paid her for the services, Matjošaitytė declined to disclose the information, saying it was protected by attorney client confidentiality. Nemunas Dawn vice-chairman Robertas Puchovičius told Delfi he did not know whether the party had paid her.

The Central Electoral Commission said it had found no expenditure for Matjošaitytė’s legal services in the party’s submitted financial documents.

President Gitanas Nausėda said the information made public did not look particularly positive, but declined to give a final assessment, saying he wanted to examine the circumstances more closely.

The Central Electoral Commission recently found that Nemunas Dawn and its leader Remigijus Žemaitaitis had seriously violated the law by accepting money from illegal sources during the 2024 parliamentary and presidential election campaigns.

The commission’s investigation found that Nemunas Dawn financed its 2024 parliamentary election campaign through donations from legal entities and through third parties. It also found that the party accepted and used 4,300 euros in membership fees paid through third parties, part of which came from a legal entity.

The commission further said that the party’s deputy chairman and election campaign chief, Puchovičius, had acted as an intermediary in transferring a total of 24,200 euros from the companies Tvari statyba and Lajota to finance Nemunas Dawn’s parliamentary election campaign.