"At the moment, 29 officers are detained but the number is most probably not final," Jovaiša, chief prosecutor of the Organized Crimes and Corruption Investigation Department at Vilnius Regional Prosecutor's Office, said at a press conference on Wednesday.
The detainees worked at Medininkai road post. The Customs Department says it's the largest-scale corruption case in the history of the Lithuanian Customs.
Antanas Sipavičius, director general of the Lithuanian Customs, says that road post inspectors, with over 90 inspectors working at the post, were detained. Some were detained at the post itself and others were taken into custody soon after arriving to work or at home.
According to Sipavičius, anonymous calls were received from drivers and business organizations who said that several post officers were collecting LTL 20-40 (EUR 5.8-11.6) fees for entering Lithuania. The money would be given to officers together with ID documents. In cases when alleged violations were identified, drivers were asked to pay bribes for going smoothly and swiftly through customs procedures.
"The bribe size depended on the nature of an alleged violation," Silipavičius said.
In his words, around LTL 1,000 would be collected from drivers per day.
According to the director general, the arrests impeded work at Medininkai road post. "They slightly impeded our work but we are swiftly redistributing our forces, and I think that following this short disruption, the checkpoint will get back to normal work soon," he said.
System clearing itself
Lithuania's outgoing Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius says that the scale of offences at the Lithuanian Customs raises concern, but it is good that the Customs Service is clearing itself.
"It shows, first of all, the fact that the customs services have plenty of ability and experience to identify their own internal problems and fight them. The very scale of offences should in fact raise concern for all of us, and the fact that the Customs, its special services, identified such offences themselves is good. It shows that the system is able to clear itself," Kubilius told journalists on Wednesday.
Disrupted work
The detention of nearly thirty customs officers disrupted the operations of Medininkai checkpoint on the Lithuanian-Belarusian border and saw its throughput plummet almost fourfold, the Lithuanian national road carriers’ association, Linava, has said.
Throughput has dropped to 6 trucks per hour by around noon on Wednesday, from the usual figure of 25 trucks, according to Gytis Vincevičius, Linava spokesman.
“We hope that this will not bring about any serious problems. We have not yet received any complaints from haulers. Several hours should not have any major effects. The situation at the checkpoint will get somewhat clearer in the afternoon or at night,” he told BNS.
Gintarė Vitkauskaitė, spokeswoman for the Customs Department, could not specify the number of customs officers currently working at the checkpoint of Medininkai.
“Lithuania’s Customs service is organizing its operations in a way that should leave haulers unaffected by any disruptions in the work of its checkpoints,” she told BNS.
Medininkai is the main checkpoint on the Lithuanian-Belarusian border handling around 600 trucks per day. It is usually manned by around 80 customs officers.
