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O. Vėbrienė reported this during a press conference on Monday. She claims that she has approached the Attorney General’s Office for the behavior of Environment Minister Simon Gentville.
“After examining the information, the Prosecutor’s Office granted me the status of rapporteur, so I have been protected by the Law on Protection of Interlocutors for some time,” said O. Vėbrienė.
“My head, the minister, is aware of this information, he is aware of my decisions and has felt quite a lot, because some attack has subsided for a while, but now he is back,” added the head of the department.
He later told BNS that he had reported what he believed to be illegal behavior by Mr. Gentville, but added that he could not reveal the details as the investigation was ongoing.
The department director also told reporters that he had no intention of resigning, but acknowledged that the institution’s work had been restricted for some time due to the conflict with Minister Gentville.
“There is no need to fool yourself or yourself, the activities of the institution have been paralyzed for a long time, everything happened before Christmas. But this did not really reduce my fundamental desire to turn this institution into a watchdog that meets the highest management standards, ”said O. Vėbrienė.
“I say boldly and publicly that I will not give up … I am making plans for the entire period,” he added.
The Whistleblower Protection Act stipulates that a person who has been granted such status cannot be fired, demoted or reduced in salary.
The friction between the minister and O. Vėbrienė occurred when he removed the environmentalist, who informed S. Gentvilas about the oil spill at the Būtingė terminal late last year during the holidays.
The Minister, for his part, claimed to have received a disproportionate number of complaints from employees of the Department of Environmental Protection and to have himself initiated an official inspection as to whether said environmentalist had been legally removed from his post. S. Gentvilas also raised the issue of establishing leadership positions in the personnel policy department.
O. Vėbrienė became the permanent head of the Department of Environmental Protection in August, replacing Valdas Laukis, whose head of the department received criticism after the Ekologistika fire tire recycling company in Alytus and the contamination of Grigeo Klaipėda in the Curonian lagoon.
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