The way political parties are financed has become one the major variables in assessing the quality of democracy, decision-making transparency and the level of in-country corruption. Aiming to free the political decision-making process from narrow interests Lithuania is now a stand-out example of strict regulation of political party and political campaign funding. Abolishing legal person donations and making the state the largest funding donor was supposed to help to eradicate the quid pro quo relationship between business and politics. However, the related cultural change did not move in the same pace and spread unevenly across the public and private sectors. In this paper, using the data gathered from anonymous interviews with high-ranking politicians and business representatives, we analyse the case of politics-business relations in Lithuania. First, drawing on conceptual model proposed by Lebedeva (2006) we present a typology of informal business-political practices. We divide the later into three major categories: legal-unethical, illegal-ethical and illegal-unethical. Further, to better grasp the power dynamics of these relationships we look into administrative-territorial divide. More specifically, we analyse how the symmetry of business-politics relationship changes depending on its locus, focusing on the weight of political institutions (national government, big and small municipalities) and whether respective governing parties enjoy state subsidies.
