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In a remote meeting that took place on Wednesday, Fr. Gražulis spoke from home, sitting on the couch. However, he was soon told to turn off the image because what he wanted to say was impossible to understand.
“As always in life, I will only tell the truth”, said P. Gražulis and his thought stopped again.
Other members of the commission asked a colleague to change his location. He explained that he was in the Seimas’ bedroom, unless he could move to another room.
The prosecutor requested a closed hearing
Prosecutor Rolandas Stankevičius asked the commission to hold a closed session, as he assured that when answering questions from the members of the Seimas, he intended to present the data from the pre-trial investigation, which could not be made public.
Commission chairman Arminas Lydeka complied with the request and asked reporters at the remote meeting.
After a while, the journalists returned to the audience. P. Gražulis’s voice remained stagnant.
“I would send you perhaps three pages of my …, where I would expose it, according to the doctrine of the Constitutional Court, so that … the commission can answer three questions: is there political persecution or not?”
Commissioners were asked to turn off video and audio to improve quality, but this did not help.
“Maybe I should turn off the video camera?” Asked P. Gražulis.
It also turned off the image, but that didn’t help. “Nothing is impossible to understand,” said Ligita Girskienė, a “peasant”.
P. Gražulis was asked to go to the Seimas and try to speak. He agreed to do it in a matter of minutes.
After P. Gražulis moved to the Seimas, the connection improved. He then expressed his views on the waiver of immunity. According to him, once the Seimas has already recognized that the case is political, and no new circumstances have arisen in the case.
“Perhaps I should contact the Ethics and Procedures Commission, or can the waiver of immunity be requested again on the same matter?” I ask.
P. Gražulis assured that all the members of the Seimas who will represent the electorate will receive the same luck and suspicions if they do something, even without seeking their own interest, in any commercial matter.
He assured that the most important accusation for him was that he used the car for free. According to him, the rent was paid only if the Chancellery of the Seimas did not notice an error in the order.
“It was planned that I could refuel, there was a card and, of course, the limit, do not exceed that limit, but the Prosecutor’s Office says that the company did not issue the card that it was supposed to issue,” he explained.
During the trip, Gražulis said that he had asked assistant Ramutė Pochomovaitė, who also worked for Judex, to buy tickets and give him cash, without even knowing that he was buying tickets with money from Judex.
The Seimas will decide inviolability
Regardless of what the temporary commission decides, the Seimas will continue to have the last word on the legal immunity of P. Gražulis. It takes 71 parliamentary votes to remove it.
The Seimas has already addressed this issue in the previous legislature. Although the temporary commission then proposed to the Seimas to waive the politician’s legal immunity, the Seimas did not agree.
Waiver of legal immunity for Mr. Gražulis is repeatedly requested to complete the pre-trial investigation into the politician’s allegedly illegal actions, which is why the abuse pre-trial investigation was terminated last fall.
The Prosecutor’s Office explains that the fact that the parliamentarian was sworn in after this year’s elections again allows for the repeated request for the waiver of the immunity of P. Gražulis.
According to law enforcement data, P. Gražulis helped manage problems at the frozen food company Judex, when Russian officials found the Listeria bacteria in the company’s products in 2015.
According to prosecutors, while helping the company, a member of Seimas repeatedly called Lithuanian and Russian officials, went to the Russian Krasnodar Krai region to influence Russian officials, urged businessmen to give bribes, asked to violate procedures existing and received from Judex. Property benefits.
In June 2019, BNS cited a letter from the prosecutor to the Seimas, saying, among other things, that P. Gražulis encouraged bribes to Russian officials and received money and a car from Judex.
Read more about it here.
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