Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis has recently come under fire for not publicly declaring the ownership of a villa on the Greek island of Aegina. But he is hardly the only Lithuanian politician boasting property abroad. The LRT Investigations Team has examined asset declarations of Lithuanian politicians and civil servants.
It turns out that around 200 public figures have assets abroad worth almost 29 million euros. Gintautas Paluckas, one of the leaders of the Lithuanian Social Democratic Party (LSDP), has revealed on social media that he owns two plots of land abroad – in Brazil and Turkey. It was the LRT Investigation Team’s questions that prompted him to publish this information.
“So where is your plot abroad? I was very amused by this question from a journalist I recently met. I have been waiting for an opportunity to boast for a long time,” Paluckas wrote on Facebook on Wednesday evening. A day before, LRT asked Paluckas in which country he owned a plot of land worth 180,000 euros.
This was stated in his declaration of assets submitted to the State Tax Inspectorate (VMI). It turned out that he had bought a plot of land in Florianopolis, Brazil, when he visited it for holidays last year. According to Paluckas, the land in Brazil was for investment purposes, while the one in Turkey was for farming.
There, he owns a nut plantation with 1,400 nut trees. The six hectares of land in Turkey were not included in Paluckas’ asset declaration because it .