Lithuania - an odd question
 

I just spent a week on vacation in Lithuania (after time spent in Estonia & Latvia). Something that I noticed about Lithuania (in Vilnius, Klaipeda & Kaunas) was the abundance of late model luxury cars (Porsche, BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar and even a RR) with Lithuanian plates.

Let alone elsewhere in the Baltics, even in Germany & Switzerland I have never come across such an abundance of luxury cars.

Does anybody have any light to shed on this mystery?

I would suspect many of them belonged to Russians; places like Klaipėda and Palanga have been beach vacation destinations dating back to Soviet days. (Such was my experience when I was there visiting family.)

Right , the russian diaspora is very huge in baltic countries , especially latvia and riga , which cause some issues

During communism it was a very popular for russian to go to baltic sea for vacations because its very close to moscow and st petersburg

I believe that the Stockmann department store in Helsinki did a lot of business with Russians during Communist times.

why the lith plates?

This summer around Denmark and Sweden I was encountering a lot of new/young luxury vehicles with Lithuanian license plates. It seemed to be more of a seasonal or special event thing, but not really sure.

I do know that there used to be a way to use these license plates to avoid paying congestion fees and perhaps even avoid some fines, but I am not sure if that is still the case in the way it used to be.

That is exactly my question too. The cars I saw did not seem to be temporary plates or its occupants were not obviously tourists or visitors. So I would imagine that it would be Lithuanians who owned these cars and I was merely questioning the source of this apparent wealth.

Talking of rich Russians, I did see a number of expensive cars (including a few fancy Cadillacs) with Russian plates at the Coronian Spit - but they usually had the suffix 39 or 91, indicating that they were from Kaliningrad (Koenigsberg)