Following the money in Lithuania with ‘Hot Feet’

Connecting politically exposed persons with government spending

From corruption on the local level to multi-billion-dollar money laundering schemes, financial crime in Lithuania has been at the center of several OCCRP investigations.

Much of our reporting in the Baltic state — including this investigation into COVID-19 procurement contracts — has come from publicly available data, since its government is relatively transparent, especially compared to notoriously opaque neighbors like Belarus or Russia.

As of October, much of this public data has been unified for the first time in Karštos Pedos, which translates to “Hot Feet” in English, a platform where anyone can see the links between politically exposed persons in Lithuania and government spending.

Šarūnas Černiauskas, founder of our Lithuanian member center Siena, led the project after getting frustrated with routinely spending hours digging through Lithuania’s various procurement databases to find a single data point.

“In a few clicks, you can trace connections on the platform that would take a skilled journalist hours or days to make,” says Černiauskas, “I expect it to deliver a story within months.”

Following the money visually

At its core, Hot Feet is a data visualization tool that allows users to see connections between public officials, agencies, and government contracts.

To show how the tool works, we’ll look at what turns up for Kęstas Komskis, a Lithuanian politician who was recently charged with embezzlement after multiple Siena investigations.

In a search of Komskis, you can immediately see that he’s listed as a shareholder in several business or legal entities, which are represented by pink nodes. One of them is UAB Agrolira, the construction firm that Komskis is accused of intentionally bankrupting for financial gain (A UAB is a type of limited liability entity in Lithuania).

By clicking UAB Agrolira, you can see the dozens of contracts and tenders awarded to the firm, which are represented with blue nodes.

On the other side of the nodes, you can see the government agency that awarded the contracts: Pagegiai, the municipality where Komskis serves as a member of the local council.

In four clicks, we were able to show that the municipal government that Komskis works for awarded contracts to a firm he owns. Does this prove impropriety on its own? Not necessarily. But it can yield enough information for a journalist to keep digging.

Data included in Hot Feet

Hot Feet brings together publicly available data from Lithuania’s Public Procurement Office, Central Commission for Official Ethics, and Ministry of Finance. This includes:

• Declarations of interest of politicians and high-ranking civil servants.
• Public procurement information from Lithuania’s Public Procurement Office.
• Declarations filed by candidates to the Seimas (parliament), Lithuanian municipal councils, and European Parliament.
• E.U. investment data. Information on which legal entities have received E.U. funding for their projects is made public. This information includes billions of euros’ worth of investments in Lithuania.

‍Currently available data includes 1,500+ declarations of interest, 200,000+ procurement contracts and their amendments for a total value of 94 + billion euros, and 22,800 E.U.-funded projects for a total value of 2.7 billion euros. The database will be periodically updated with new publicly available data.

Černiauskas says the most significant gap in Hot Feet’s data right now is from the E.U. Currently, the platform has data from roughly 22,800 E.U.-funded projects totalling 2.7 billion euros — but that’s only a portion of what the bloc allocates to Lithuania.

Funded by the European Commision, Karstos Pedos was co-developed by Siena and the Lithuanian nonprofit Media4Change. Its data analysis is enabled by Linkurious, a graph visualization and analysis platform used by financial institutions, government agencies, and investigative reporters worldwide. For example, it is the tool used for ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks database, which combines information on the ownership of secretive offshore entities as exposed in several global leaks, including the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers.

Note: Hot Feet does not in itself implicate conflicts of interest, corruption, or other criminal acts. We strongly recommend double-checking the data found in Hot Feet against primary sources, as inaccuracies are possible in both policy declarations and automated data analysis.

The database is not yet adapted for easy use on mobile devices. While we are preparing the necessary solutions, we strongly recommend that you use the Hot Feet system on your computer.