Lithuania’s Constitutional Court head pledges conclusion on Bastys by 2018

“The Constitutional Court now has co make and publish the conclusion, this should take place within a month, according to the law, but there is hope that this would happen before the end of this year, before Christmas. The deadline is January 5 but I would truly want to have it done by Christmas,” Dainius Žalimas, the president of the Constitutional Court, told journalists after a day of hearings.

During the hearing, the court heard initiators of the impeachment procedure, Bastys and his defence, an office of the State Security Department testified on the check to verify his credibility to work with classified information.

The court must answer whether Bastys’ actions specified in the conclusions by the impeachment commission run counter to the country’s main law. The impeachment commission says in its conclusion that Bastys breached the oath by concealing his ties with Piotr Voyeiko and by helping to arrange publicly unannounced meetings between Rosatom‘s people and top officials of Lithuanian state authorities.

Bastys, who is accused over ties with Rusisa, categorically disagrees with the conclusion that his actions constituted a violation of his oath of office.

Bastys also faces impeachment over his ties with certain individuals named in intelligence materials, including Yevgeny Kostin, who is seen as a representative of Rosatom, Ernest Matskevich, a journalist of the Russian state channel RTR, Saturnas Dubininkas, who is said to be a former Kaunas mafia leader, and Vadim Pakhomov, a businessman suspected of illegal activity.