LRT council reaffirms director’s breach of work duties

The council of Lithuania’s national public broadcaster LRT has again found director Monika Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė breached her work duties by failing to disclose information about people whose services the institution had purchased, LRT reported on Monday.

Council chairman Mindaugas Jurkynas said the decision, originally adopted in September, was upheld unchanged in a secret ballot after Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė asked the council to reconsider it. He described the meeting’s discussion as legal in nature, covering the prosecutor’s findings, deadlines and other issues.

Garbačiauskaitė-Budrienė argued that the decision contained statements that did not reflect the facts and that the sanction was imposed outside the deadlines set by the Labour Code, according to BNS.

Jurkynas said the council’s rules and the LRT law provided no further opportunity to seek a reconsideration. He said any other legal options should be discussed with lawyers.

The council found the breach in September, when eight members supported the decision and four declined to take part in the vote.

In a decision issued over the summer, the Prosecutor General’s Office instructed LRT to assess individually each case in which supplier names were omitted from publicly available programme procurement reports, rather than withholding them automatically on data protection grounds. The office said LRT had decided not to disclose supplier names without assessing each procurement separately. LRT later amended its report on programme purchases from the previous year.

The council had earlier supported the initial decision to withhold suppliers’ names. Jurkynas said, however, that after discussions and consideration, the council’s role had not been viewed as essential.