This defender represents three defendants – company operators Vasilijas Jefimovs, Arūnas Skiers, as well as Rima Ivaškevičienė, who is currently retired.
Prosecutor Gina Skersinskytė submitted the request to remove the lawyer following the court session began.
According to her, during the pre-trial investigation, V.Kiciatovas represented two other persons – cameramen Virgiliis Šlepavičiis and Gediminas Bironts, whose status has changed at the moment, they are witnesses. These individuals testified at the last court hearing.
According to the prosecutor, the mentioned persons V.Šlepavičius and G.Birontas were released from responsibility following testifying. According to G.Skersinskytė, the Code of Criminal Procedure provides that a lawyer does not have the right to participate in a case as a defense attorney, if in the same case he provides or previously provided legal assistance to a person whose interests conflict with the interests of the person applying to conduct the case.
The lawyer himself claims that an absurd situation has arisen, because the fact that the prosecutor’s office has only now noticed the situation is not true.
“The prosecutor knew this situation from the beginning, from my defense V. Šlepavičius, G. Bironto, later – V. Jefimov and A. Skieraus. I can’t tell you the date, but until the first half of 2020-2021 I defended V. Šlepavičius and G. Birontas, I started to defend V. Jefimov with A. Skierum when V. Šlepavičius and G. Birontas were released from responsibility, the process was terminated.” – said V. Kiciatovas while participating in the meeting remotely.
According to him, neither the prosecutor nor he himself saw any contradictions in the interests of the defense. Currently, the situation has not changed.
The colleague was also defended by most of the lawyers representing the other suspects.
According to “Grigeo Klaipėda” attorney Linas Sesick, the institute of disqualification of the attorney is intended to protect the interests of the defendants, but this request aims at other procedural goals – to protect the reliability of the testimony of V. Šlepavičius and G. Bironto as witnesses.
“If the prosecutor really had a question regarding the reliability of the testimony, she should have raised it at the stage of the pre-trial investigation or decided before the trial began. Now we have a situation where the case has started to be examined, the prosecutors did not have such a question, it arose when the mentioned persons, G.Birontas, V.Šlepavičius, testified. Maybe he made the testimony inadmissible?”, said the defender.
Indrė Kupcikevičiūtė, one of the defense attorneys representing the Department of Environmental Protection, said that there are doubts regarding the lawyer’s ability to participate in the process, as he defends persons whose interests are in conflict with previously represented participants in the process, this also determines the questions asked to the witnesses, but whether this is a sufficient reason for disqualification is left for the court to decide.
The court will announce the decision next week.
In the Curonian Lagoon pollution case, accusations of abuse, falsification and disposal of documents and violations of environmental protection rules were brought once morest the joint-stock company “Grigeo Klaipėda” and 14 other current and former employees of this company.
In the criminal case, which received a great response in society, in which the indictment consists of more than 300 pages, the shareholder and chairman of the board of the Grigeo group G. Pangonis, the current manager of the Klaipėda company Tomas Eikinas, three previous managers of this company and other persons were recognized as defendants.
This large-scale case contains more than 20,000 documents, data of interviewed suspects, witnesses, conclusions of various experts, additional documents and other data relevant to the investigation.
The Environmental Protection Department determined the property damage caused to nature, and filed a civil lawsuit once morest the company for more than 48 million euros.
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2024-07-17 00:00:07
