This was the end of the years-long story involving a businessman who ran a company operating in Vilnius – the judges decided that he should be paid almost 24 thousand euros, which the fraudsters embezzled from the bank account, as well as interest and incurred litigation costs.
Since the criminals convicted of fraud are still serving their sentences and have no assets, the compensation awarded to the businessman will have to be paid out of a special account by the Ministry of Justice (TM), which will later have the opportunity to collect part of the funds from the convicted – Saulius Macijauskas and Remigijaus Vaišios, who were sentenced to 4 years respectively and 5 years and 4 months in prison.
“There is a basis for establishing objective complicity, because the damage caused to the applicant occurred due to several separate, but interdependent reasons: without the illegal actions committed by the Registry Center, the perpetrators of the crime – S. Macijauskas and R. Vaišius – would not have had the opportunity to appropriate the applicant’s wallets the funds that were in the bank account opened in the name of the applicant”, stated the panel chaired by judge Veslava Ruskan.
The court established the indivisibility of the damage and the commonality of the defendants’ actions in an objective sense, because all the defendants – the state of Lithuania, represented by TM, and the persons who committed the criminal act S. Macijauskas and R. Vaišys – contributed to the occurrence of the damage caused to the entrepreneur in essence, because without them the damage would not have occurred at all .
“Although the actions of the Registry Center were indirectly connected with the damage caused to the applicant, the illegal actions of the Registry Center, which caused damage to the applicant, are generally related to the occurrence of all the damage caused to the applicant, and not only to a certain part of it,” the court emphasized.
Previously, the court convicted S. Macijauskas and R. Vaišis for producing fake and forged business documents and submitting them to the Registry Center and SEB Bank and for fraudulently obtaining the right to dispose of high-value assets – EUR 23,820 in cash.
In this case, it was established that S. Macijauskas, who came to the Vilnius branch of the Register Center, submitted the only and only fake document signed by himself and prepared by R. Vaišios – a decision of a businessman, the sole shareholder, in which S. Macijauskas was recorded as the sole shareholder, stated, that the businessman who previously managed the company is dismissed from the position of director, and S. Macijauskas appoints himself as the new manager of the company. The registration center was also provided with the forms required by law to make the changes.
The Registry Center accepted the documents and, based on the falsified decision of the sole shareholder, decided to register S. Macijauskas as the sole shareholder and director of the company, and also prepared an electronic certified statement and sent the access code to the new director by text message and e-mail.
“The actions of the employees of the registry center created the conditions for the seizure of funds belonging to me,” the businessman said when addressing the court.
According to him, later, as was established in the criminal case, on the instructions of R. Vaišios, S. Macijauskas went to the bank, where, by forging documents, he illegally obtained the right to dispose of the company’s funds – after receiving electronic banking login data and code generator scammers, he connected to the bank a dozen times accounts and took possession of 23 thousand in parts. 820 EUR.
The businessman noticed that this amount of money was missing from the account almost two weeks later – the fraudsters had not yet managed to take possession of a much larger amount of money.
A businessman who became a victim of criminals emphasized that he had submitted a claim to the Registry Center for compensation, but the employees of the state company refused to return the money embezzled by the fraudsters.
According to him, the employees of the Registry Center, upon receiving the request of S. Macijauskas to change his data as the sole shareholder and director, had the duty to verify the authenticity of the data provided, and not only the filling of the forms and the correspondence of the data specified in the forms with the documents attached to them.
“When requesting to change the company’s data on its participants (shareholders), the accuracy of the data specified by S. Macijauskas was not checked”, the businessman noted that the court had previously determined that the data on the company’s shareholder, when he is a single person, had not been submitted to the administrator of the register of legal entities , deregistration of data, nor was there a notification that all shares were purchased or transferred to him by another person.
The judges have established that the initiator and mastermind of these crimes was R. Vaišys, and S. Macijauskas only followed his instructions. Where he got the data of the manager of the company, which he illegally took over, was never established. Other businessmen also suffered from them.
During the hearing of the criminal case, S. Macijauskas told the courts that R. Vaišys offered him to earn money – he promised that it would be an official job in his company, that he would only need to submit documents and collect money, because he cannot do it himself.
“R. Vaišys told me that he would prepare all the documents, he would call and I would have to collect the documents from him and go to the Registry Center, he said that he would write down on a sheet what actions would need to be taken, he promised to pay me when the money was transferred, S. Macijauskas said. – I performed all the steps that R. Vaišys instructed me to do – I signed the documents prepared by him, I went to the Registry Center, banks, submitted the necessary documents, received a PIN code generator at the bank, logins to the company’s accounts, and later both at the bank and by transferring online to my I cashed out the accounts and gave them to R. Vaišius. For this, I received a reward from him – once – 200, and another time – 500 euros.”
The businessman who brought the case to the state noted that the illegal actions of the employees of the Registry Center were not the only cause of the damage he suffered, but if the employees of the Registry Center had performed their duties properly, had been at least a little more prudent and taken appropriate measures, S. Macijauskas and R. Vaišys would not have had even the possibilities of expropriation of monetary funds.
“Although there is an indirect causal connection between the illegal and negligent actions of the employees of the Registry Center and the damage caused to me, the actions by which S. Macijauskas and R. Vaišys, without making any special efforts, achieved that S. Macijauskas was registered as the manager of the property belonging to me, confirm that both The actions of both the employees of the registry center and the fraudsters are related, which is why they are not responsible for the relevant part, but jointly for all the damage I caused,” he explained to the court.
At that time, the TM representing the state of Lithuania disagreed with the lawsuit filed by the businessman and noted that the employees of the Vilnius branch of the Registry Center were provided with the appropriate documents for data registration, so there was no reason to doubt their authenticity.
“The relevant employees of the Vilnius branch of the Registry Center do not have the right to independently decide on the existence of any factual circumstances and to assess them, because their duty is only to check whether the documents submitted to them meet the requirements set by the legal acts, the legal acts do not provide for any exceptions that allow the registry administrator to change the legal entity data, in the absence of relevant documents or on the basis of documents not provided for in legal acts”, – TM representatives emphasized that there was no legal basis to refuse to register changes to the data of the company belonging to the entrepreneur, and the employees of the Registry Center properly performed their duties.
In their response to the court, TM representatives also stated that there is no causal connection between the actions of the Registry Center employees and the damage caused to the businessman, or that the causal connection is too distant from the damage caused to him.
“There is no reason to conclude that the employees of the Registry Center had to refuse to accept the documents submitted by the shareholder due to the change of shareholder, when such a request can also be made by the management body of a legal entity,” – according to them, the businessman who was engaged in economic activity was constantly making bank transfers, therefore, if ” would have noticed the decrease in cash funds sooner, it is likely that S. Macijauskas would not have been able to carry out the planned actions”.
“If the damage is compensated jointly, the state of Lithuania would have an excessive burden of responsibility, and the persons found guilty of having committed acts contrary to the law would avoid compensation”, explained TM lawyers.
At that time, the representatives of the Registry Center indicated to the court that the bank should take responsibility for the money embezzled from the account belonging to the entrepreneur – there is no evidence that the bank employees would have taken any action to stop the embezzlement of future funds from the entrepreneur’s bank account.
“The bank was not sufficiently attentive and careful, it violated the duty of general care, and the actions of the bank’s employees and their influence on the resulting consequences should be evaluated together with the actions of other defendants,” said the lawyers of the Registry Center.
However, the court did not agree with this position and decided that the damage to the businessman should be jointly compensated by the state of Lithuania and the fraudster should be sentenced. According to the judges, the economic damage to the businessman was caused by the illegal actions of the employees of the Registry Center, although they were also connected by an indirect causal relationship.
Tags: long struggle proved Registry Center complicit fraudsters
