"National Unification" applied to the Prosecutor's Office on Thursday, requesting to be guided by Article 19 of the Law on the Prosecutor's Office. 1 d. to initiate the public interest protection procedure and apply to the court in order to National Stadium the concession contract would be terminated from the beginning of its conclusion.
"In the deep conviction of the National Union, such a situation, when the public pays huge sums of money under the National Stadium Concession Agreement, which is additionally borrowed from a private entity at huge interest rates, when the state or municipalities can currently borrow at extremely low or even negative interest rates, and the benefits from the Agreement received by a private entity - concessionaire and financier - meets the condition of violation of the public interest. Both the public interest and its violation are obvious. In our party's assessment, if this contract is not terminated, but if it is fulfilled, society could suffer huge losses. Therefore, the need to protect the public interest must also be established. With a request to do that, we turned to the Vilnius district prosecutor's office", - the chairman of "Nacionalinis vivienijimas" prof. Vytautas Radžvilas.
In the public interest defense request, the party relies on its previously published legal assessment of the National Stadium Concession Agreement. It states three fundamental violations. Firstly, that no Lithuanian courts in any cases found that the concession contract is legal and reasonable, on the contrary, LVAT found that the Public Procurement Service has the right to re-evaluate the contract after correcting the previous deficiencies. Secondly, that the society will borrow money from a private financier for the construction of the planned Multi-purpose facility at extremely high interest rates, the size of which is close to or equal to the interest rates of the most risky loans, that is, consumer loans for natural persons. Thirdly, the private concessionaire will receive an annual salary from public funds for the operation of the Multipurpose Facility for the entire duration of the contract, i.e. 25 years, and a part of the Multipurpose Facility will be transferred to him free of charge (without any rent) during this time. For the use of this facility for public needs, the public will pay the private concessionaire a salary corresponding to the market price, that is, the public will pay the private entity a salary corresponding to the market price for the use of its own property.
"For the reasons listed, the stadium concession contract seems harmful to both the state and the city of Vilnius, and its surprising uneconomicalness and inconsistency with the public interest inevitably raise doubts about the potentially corrupt nature of such a contract. "Remembering how this decision was made in exceptional haste and "sloppy" by possibly violating the procedures with repeated votes and not giving the council members time to familiarize themselves with the voting materials, we feel obliged to initiate an investigation of this contract", said the political scientist Vytautas Sinica, vice-chairman of the party.
Aleksandras Nemunaitis, the chairman of the party's Audit Committee, who analyzed and criticized the provisions of the concession contract for the national stadium in the public space, is surprised that the contract commits to investments in infrastructure that would have been enough for the construction of the stadium itself, but meanwhile, for the construction of the stadium, an amount is borrowed at huge interest, which the municipality obviously had and could allocate . According to him, there is no justification why it was decided to "cover the stadium with other objects", and the municipality only needed to build the stadium and do it on its own - with its own money or by borrowing at minimal interest.
