Saulius Skvernelis

He is married to Silvija Skvernelė, and the couple have two children.

Saulius Skvernelis was born on 23 July 1970 in Kaunas, Lithuania.

In 2005, Skvernelis obtained a Master’s degree in Law from Mykolas Romeris University.

In 2002, Skvernelis earned a Bachelor’s degree in Law from the Lithuanian Law University (now part of Mykolas Romeris University).

He graduated from Vilnius Gediminas Technical University in 1994 with a degree in mechanical engineering.

He completed his secondary education in 1988 at Marijampolė’s Jonas Jablonskis Secondary School, which is now known as Marijampolė Rygiškių Jonas Gymnasium.

He was appointed the Commissioner General of the Lithuanian Police in 2011 and served in that top law enforcement post until 2014.

Skvernelis served as Deputy Police Commissioner General of Lithuania from 2008 until 2011.

He headed the Lithuanian Police Traffic Supervision Service from 2005 to 2008.

From 2003 to 2005, he was the commander of the Lithuanian Police Escort Squad.

From 2001 to 2003, he was a commissar in the Road Patrol Unit of the Traffic Supervision Service at the Lithuanian Public Police Bureau.

From 1999 to 2001, Skvernelis served as a commissar inspector in the Organizational Division of the Traffic Police Service under the Police Department of the Ministry of the Interior.

In 1998, he joined the Trakai district police commissariat as a road police inspector, a post he held until 1999.

From 1994 to 1998, he served as an assistant lecturer at the Lithuanian Police Academy.

Skvernelis resigned as Speaker of the Seimas effective 10 September 2025, stepping down from the position less than a year after his election.

On 14 November 2024, Skvernelis was elected Speaker of the Seimas (the 14th Lithuanian Parliament).

On 29 January 2022, Saulius Skvernelis was elected as the first chairman of the newly established Democratic Union "For Lithuania" party.

He briefly served as the Leader of the Opposition in the Seimas from March 25, 2021 until September 10, 2021.

In September 2021, after a dispute with LVŽS leader Ramūnas Karbauskis, he left the Farmers and Greens Union’s parliamentary group and initiated a new political force which became the Democratic Union "For Lithuania."

He became Prime Minister of Lithuania in late 2016 and led the government until 2020.

Although he led the Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union to a landslide victory in 2016 and became Prime Minister, Skvernelis never actually joined that party.

From 2014 to 2016, Saulius Skvernelis served as the Minister of the Interior of the Republic of Lithuania.

Skvernelis was appointed as Lithuania’s Interior Minister in November 2014 after the incumbent, Dailis Alfonsas Barakauskas, resigned amid a corruption investigation. President Dalia Grybauskaitė swiftly approved Skvernelis – then serving as Police Commissioner General – citing his extensive experience in the internal affairs system and the public trust he had earned.

During the 2020–2024 parliamentary term, he was a member of the Seimas National Security and Defence Committee.

In 2024, he again won a Seimas seat, this time via the party list of the Democratic Union "For Lithuania".

In the 2024 parliamentary elections, Skvernelis headed the Democratic Union "For Lithuania" party list and was once again elected to the Seimas via the multi-member (proportional) constituency. He did not contest any single-member district in 2024.

He was re-elected to the Seimas in 2020 on the list of the Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union (LVŽS).

In the 2020 elections, Skvernelis’s former district was merged into the new Pilaitė–Karoliniškės constituency. Running there, he placed a distant second in the first round with only 14.81% of votes and ultimately lost in the runoff to TS-LKD candidate Radvilė Morkūnaitė-Mikulėnienė. Nevertheless, Skvernelis was re-elected to the Seimas via the Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union’s national list – he was ranked #2 on the list but received the most preference (pirmumo) votes of any LVŽS candidate, effectively boosting him to the top spot.

Skvernelis ran for President of Lithuania in 2019, securing 19.7% of the vote in the first round and finishing in third place, thus failing to advance to the runoff.

After finishing third in the May 2019 presidential election, Skvernelis initially announced he would resign as Prime Minister in July 2019, but he soon reversed that decision, calling his resignation pledge "purely emotional."

In the October 2016 parliamentary elections, Skvernelis was elected to the Seimas from the Karoliniškės single-member constituency (No. 8) as a candidate nominated by the Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union.

During the 2016 Seimas elections, Skvernelis ran in Vilnius’s Karoliniškės single-member constituency. He led the first voting round with 30.08% of the vote and went on to win the runoff with about 52.9%, defeating the incumbent, conservative Kęstutis Masiulis.

The Lithuanian Police Commissioner General’s monthly gross salary is about €4,500 (as of 2024).

In Lithuania, cabinet ministers’ official salaries are roughly in the €4,000–€6,000 per month range (gross). For example, the Economy and Innovation Minister’s pay is under €5,000, while the Health Minister’s salary is about €6,351.

Between 2018 and 2022, Skvernelis’s declared net worth more than doubled – from roughly €202k to about €428k – even though his income during that period came primarily from public service positions. This rapid asset growth was noted publicly, though no wrongdoing was determined by authorities.

Silvija Skvernelė (Saulius’s wife) has had modest assets of her own. In 2018, she declared about €9,000 worth of shares (Swedbank stock) and €6,400 in savings. By the end of 2019, her savings had grown to nearly €16,000, while the value of her shares was just over €7,000; she also purchased a car for €12,000 in 2019.

As Prime Minister, Skvernelis earned roughly €3,221 per month net („į rankas“) in 2018, a figure that was set to rise to about €3,348 in 2019 after tax changes (gross salary on the order of €5,000+ before taxes).

In his 2018 wealth declaration, Skvernelis reported owning a house valued at €128,302 (his share), other buildings worth €1,208, land plots for €5,792, and other registered property valued at €550. He also declared about €81,500 in savings and an outstanding loan of €31,500. His wife had roughly €9,000 in shares and €6,400 in savings, making their total declared family assets around €201,600 for 2018.

Skvernelis’s declared family assets have grown significantly over the past decade. In 2016, he and his wife declared roughly €214,000 in total assets, increasing to about €228,000 in 2017. After a dip to €201,600 in 2018 (when he also carried an outstanding €31,500 loan), their assets more than doubled to approximately €428,000 by 2022, with liabilities reaching about €68,000 by 2023.

According to his 2016 asset declaration, Skvernelis indicated that his spouse’s shares were worth nearly €7,000, though the form did not specify the company (later revealed to be Swedbank).

As Interior Minister, Skvernelis earned an average monthly salary of approximately €3,665 (gross) in 2015, which was unchanged from the previous year. This made him one of the better-paid ministers in the Butkevičius cabinet.

Despite being in his forties and actively serving as Prime Minister, Skvernelis was also officially a retiree – he qualified for a law enforcement officer’s pension after 20 years of service. Since leaving the police in 2014, he has been receiving this special pension, on top of his salaries from other public offices.

In early 2020, it emerged that Skvernelis’s wife, Silvija, had become employed at an Orlen Lietuva subsidiary, fueling concerns about potential conflicts of interest given the government’s earlier concessions to the Polish oil company.

In 2018, his government was embroiled in a scandal over a settlement with the energy firm Danpower Baltic that would pay the company about 18–25 million euros in taxpayer funds to drop legal claims, a deal critics argued was orchestrated by businessmen for their own benefit.

He faced suspicions of favoring the Polish oil company Orlen during his tenure as Prime Minister by allegedly altering government procurement conditions to benefit the company, though he denied any wrongdoing.

In late 2019, a public scandal (dubbed the "keliukas" affair) arose over the expedited paving of Upės Street leading to Skvernelis’s private residence, prompting an inquiry by the Chief Ethics Commission.

In 2018, media revealed that Skvernelis had omitted his wife’s stock holdings (Swedbank shares granted via her job) from his public official interests declaration, contrary to disclosure requirements. The ethics watchdog (VTEK) reviewed the matter but decided not to pursue sanctions, reasoning that Skvernelis had disclosed his wife’s employment at the bank and their financial ties, thus adequately revealing any potential conflict.

He received state decorations from the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Republic of Italy in 2018.

Skvernelis was named "Person of the Year 2017" by the Institute of Eastern European Studies in Poland.

In 2006, he was bestowed the Order of the Crown (Knight) by the Kingdom of Belgium.