Sinkevičius rejects calls to resign or give up doctorate

Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius says he will not resign or give up his doctoral degree after an ethics commission found plagiarism in his dissertation, LRT reported.

“No, I am not considering anything on that,” Sinkevičius told reporters on Thursday. “The commission has spoken, the work will be corrected, and we will carry on.”

He said the commission had not questioned either his academic work or the degree. An international committee assessed the dissertation when he defended it, he said, and a committee had now reviewed it again, 11 years later, using artificial intelligence and other new tools. Sinkevičius said he would correct the shortcomings identified.

He said he had not yet started revising the dissertation because he had not had time. He expects to return to the work after deliberations on the state budget and the New Year.

The comments followed a call by Dainius Gaižauskas, a lawmaker from the governing coalition’s Farmers and Greens Union, for Sinkevičius to resign after the university ethics commission issued its findings. Sinkevičius said the degree had been awarded and assessed by the commission, adding that it was not for Gaižauskas to revoke it.

The ethics commission at ISM University of Management and Economics said on October 30 that it had found five instances of plagiarism in Sinkevičius’s 2015 dissertation on alcohol consumption, as well as two cases of text overlap involving the use of others’ work that it did not classify as plagiarism.

The commission found that Sinkevičius had breached the university’s academic integrity principle and the doctoral regulations’ requirement that a dissertation be independent. It gave him six months to correct the identified breaches but did not recommend immediately revoking his doctoral degree.

Sinkevičius has previously acknowledged the breaches and said he would prepare a publicly available addendum correcting the dissertation. The investigation followed a public debate over possible plagiarism in the work that began in July. He had earlier said he prepared the dissertation ethically and rejected the plagiarism allegations.