Election commission clears former PM Paluckas of gross violation

Lithuania’s Central Electoral Commission has found that former Prime Minister and Social Democrat Gintautas Paluckas did not commit a gross violation of the Electoral Code by reporting his criminal conviction in his 2024 parliamentary candidate questionnaire, LRT reported.

The commission determined that the Vilnius City First District Court’s 2010 decision to suspend execution of Paluckas’s two-year prison sentence for one year required him to compensate the awarded damages as a court obligation, not as a criminal measure.

Paluckas told the commission that he paid the damages in instalments, in 2014 and in July 2025. The Vilnius municipality confirmed this, saying that previously unregulated procedures for recording amounts owed to the municipality had made it impossible to identify the employees who failed to enter Paluckas’s debt into the financial accounting system.

The commission said that Paluckas’s candidacy for parliament before paying the remaining damages did not establish that he had failed to complete his sentence or that a criminal measure still applied to him at the time.

The Lithuanian Probation Service said Paluckas was found guilty in May 2013, with the sentence suspended for one year and an order not to leave for more than seven days without permission. The Information and Communications Department told the commission that a person is no longer considered to have a criminal conviction once the specified sentence suspension period has ended.

The commission launched its investigation in mid-May after an appeal by opposition conservatives and Liberal MP Eugenijus Gentvilas. The lawmakers had asked the commission to determine whether Paluckas committed a gross Electoral Code violation by answering “no” in his August 2024 candidate questionnaire when asked whether he had an unfinished court-imposed sentence or criminal measure.

Paluckas’s questionnaire stated that his conviction for an intentional moderately serious crime had expired in 2013. The appeal said, however, that he had paid the awarded financial damages only in 2025, after he had already taken office as a member of parliament.

The opposition cited a February 6, 2025 Constitutional Court ruling stating that a person cannot be elected until a final court act concerning them has been fully executed. It also argued that Article 176, Paragraph 6 of the Electoral Code identifies distortion of information about the execution of a conviction as grounds for finding a gross violation.

The lawmakers had asked the commission to investigate the accuracy of Paluckas’s information and, if a gross violation was established, to refer the matter to parliament to consider ending his mandate.

Paluckas resigned as prime minister at the end of July last year after journalistic investigations into his past, business ties and suspicious transactions were published.