| State Security takes over Lithuanian politician's diploma Representatives of the Lithuanian prosecutor's office were unable to establish in Moscow the authenticity of a higher education diploma issued to 46-year-old businessman and politician Viktor Uspaskich. The leader of the Labor Party, part of the ruling coalition, resigned from the post of Minister of Economy in June this year after reporters from a Lithuanian newspaper doubted that he graduated from the Academy of National Economy in 1993. Plekhanov. Their request was allegedly answered by a response from a Moscow university: such a graduate is not on the “lists.” But then the rector’s office confirmed the fact of study, although they did not provide information about obtaining a diploma. A specially created parliamentary commission was unable to find out anything, after which the case was transferred to the Center for Assessing the Quality of Diplomas.
Now the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Department of State Security of Lithuania have joined the case, as well as the Vilnius prosecutor’s office, whose representatives have already visited Moscow to sort everything out on the spot. But in the Russian capital, everywhere they came across the answers “not allowed” and “not authorized.”
On these same days, the academy finally received a response to the request of the Lithuanian Diploma Quality Assessment Center. However, according to the director of the center, Eugenijus Stumbris, this is a dismissal: “It seems that they agreed not to accept our questions.” The response states that Uspaskich was trained, but there is no confirmation that he or anyone else received a diploma with the number EV 774150. The ex-minister presented a document with this number when entering the master's program at Kaunas University of Technology. He showed it (but only a duplicate) to journalists.
Now Lithuanian prosecutors are going to Moscow again. They were blessed by the Speaker of the Seimas, Arturas Paulauskas, who called the behavior of Russian lawyers “strange.” Paulauskas, however, asked to refrain from classifying this episode as a sign of a deepening crisis in relations between the two countries and expressed hope that help would be provided.
According to Uspaskich, after he became convinced that the lawyers’ work was biased, he decided to conduct an investigation himself and hired lawyers, who found out that the vice-rector had not sent a single negative message with doubts about his studies. He promised to introduce the public to all the twists and turns of this story as soon as they finished their work.
If the falsification is discovered, Uspaskich faces criminal liability, since on the basis of his diploma he completed his doctoral studies and almost defended his dissertation. Comments from Lithuanian politicians boil down to allegations that the Russian authorities are keeping Uspaskich as “one of their own” and hiding their ends in the water in order to keep him in politics. Vladimir SKRIPOV, Vilnius |
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