Lithuanian parliament to repeat vote on budget bill

“Yesterday I decided to return the budget law to the Seimas on Thursday. If parliament agrees, we will return to the procedure which was skipped when the Seimas was adopting decisions regarding cultural workers, non-formal education and others. The finance minister as the main speaker had to ask for a break for the committee to revise the draft law and the Seimas then had to vote on the revised draft law. This procedure was skipped, the finance minister did not ask for a break, the chair of the committee did not ask it either, although it was the duty of the main speaker. Now we should return to this particular stage. If the Seimas agrees, we will have a short break for the committee to revise the draft law and then the MPs will be asked to revote on it again,” Graužinienė explained the procedure.

As reported, on 4 December, the Seimas adopted the draft state and municipal budgets for 2015 which were revised by the Government.

29 members of parliament signed an address to the Seimas Speaker Graužinienė over what they say are serious violations of the provisions of the Statute of the Seimas and the Law on Budgeting, which occurred when the 2015 budget was being approved.

The Opposition says the Seimas agreed with several MPs’ proposals on the amendment of appropriations using the resources from reduced state expenditure and debt administration cost without a concrete explanation to what extent and how these appropriations would be altered, and thus this violates the aforementioned laws.