A. Palionis shrugs off personal responsibility: decisions are taken collectively

Andry Palionis, the Minister of Agriculture, seems to be avoiding personal responsibility for the failure to pay farmers around €20 million. These funds were insufficient for farmers who had implemented projects under the Lithuanian Rural Development Programme 2014-2020 (RDP) measure "Investments in agricultural holdings" and Mr Palionis chaired a meeting of the Monitoring Committee on 3 September 2025, which unanimously voted to pay the farmers from the funds of the Strategic Plan (SP) in 2026. Mr Palionis was then Deputy Minister.

The issue of the transfer of funds was then presented by a staff member of the National Paying Agency (NPA) and after all the interventions, Mr Palionis urged for the proposal to be accepted, stating that it would not create any additional burden for the farmers or the applicants, as this redistribution of the funds from the financial plan was necessary for the closure of the RDP programme and the settlement of the accounts with the EC."

As a result of this decision, several hundred farmers (with various estimates ranging from 163 to 370) have been faced with meeting their financial obligations to construction contractors and machinery suppliers, as they were unaware for almost 2.5 months that they would not receive their funds until the end of 2025.

Farmers were personally affected by this, so Agrobite asked Palionis point blank whether the reallocation of funds was his personal initiative or the initiative of one of the divisions or departments of the Ministry of Agriculture, or of the then Minister of Agriculture, Ignas Hofmanis, or of members of his political trust team.

„Individual decision-making is not practised in the Ministry, decisions are taken on a collegial basis“, – in his reply, A. Palionis states, adding that the analysis of the progress of the implementation of the RDP, based on the data received from the NMA, provided the preconditions to discuss the issue of reallocation of the RDP funds and to discuss the possibility of the utilisation of the SP-period funds in case of a shortfall in the RDP funds.

„The Ministry has sought and is seeking to ensure that all the funds allocated under the RDP are used for the implementation of projects and are not returned to the European Commission“, – the already known arguments of the Ministry of Agriculture were listed by A. Palionis.

When asked whether the Minister felt misled now, but perhaps genuinely believed that the reallocation would not create "any additional burden for farmers or applicants", he assured that he did not feel misled.

„The decision was taken in order to use the full amount of the RDP funds and to allow project promoters to complete the projects they have started. The quoted statement emphasised that no additional conditions and requirements would be imposed on beneficiaries. The support funds will be fully disbursed to the beneficiaries only from the SP funds and not from the RDP support budget," Palionis concluded.