BRATISLAVA, January 9, (WEBNOVINY) – Interior Minister Daniel Lipsic (KDH) established Monday a specialized team seated at the police’s Office for Combating Organized Crime that will investigate circumstances in the case of alleged documents of the intelligence service SIS Gorilla. The team is composed of ten top criminal investigators from the Office for Combating Organized Crime, the Office for Combating Corruption and from the inspection office. “The investigator started Monday criminal prosecution for the crime of establishing, preparing and supporting a criminal gang which was committed by persons mainly suspicious of crimes of corruption and abuse of public representative’s powers,” Lipsic told a press conference specifying that the criminal prosecution will be supervised by the Special Prosecution Office. The special prosecution has these legal qualifications in its scope of competence and they cannot be taken away from it by other components of the prosecution which Lipsic considers very important.
According to Lipsic, it has not been possible to investigate this case to date because of a decision of SIS about not releasing the vow of confidentiality of SIS officers. Lipsic further said that there was another reason for this, namely the fact that several cases have been withdrawn by bodies of the prosecution which subsequently did not carry out criminal pursuit in these matters. “The document was not public so it was much easier to direct examination of this information to nowhere,” Lipsic said. Therefore first steps of the team will lead to removing the vow of confidentiality from SIS members, including the former and current director. Lipsic guarantees in the name of the current leadership of the interior department that police have free hands. The only job of the team members will be to examine facts from the Gorilla documents. According to the minister, it will be interesting to watch what will be happening. “I am not naive not to think that there will be quite big pressures to make the criminal pursuit unsuccessful,” Lipsic stated. He therefore calls on people to observe well further steps of the law enforcement bodies. “If it is confirmed that part of politics is controlled by financial groups, which manipulate privatization or public procurement, it means that hundreds of million euros are leaking from the state,” the minister claimed. He opines that this is an extraordinarily important case while the public should also watch well potential steps to thwart the investigation. If the data is confirmed, according to the minister, such conduct of a country respecting the rule of law is unacceptable.
He reminded that already in December, when Gorilla documents appeared on the Internet and the interior department said it would verify it again, the first reaction of the prosecution was that the documents were not authentic. “As soon as we announced we were going to investigate the matter, there appeared ambitions on the General Prosecution to create an investigation team,” Lipsic added. He does not want to comment on this to give people space to make their own opinion “whether there is effort to really investigate the case or to sweep it under the carpet”.
The interior minister does not want to guess how authentic the Gorilla documents are as it is too soon for such a judgment. “But there are quite a lot of details, quite a lot of information, several people confirmed meetings that took place in that flat, which means that part of information is certainly trustworthy,” Lipsic explained. Lipsic does not know whether there exists a copy of wiretappings. He is afraid that police in the past did not check out foreign banks accounts in tax paradises. In his opinion it is naive to expect that people would send potential kickbacks to accounts in home banks.
Documents Gorilla and Gorilla 1 testify about alleged influence of the financial group Penta on Slovakia’s politics. The extensive material describes appointment of political nominees in state-run companies, kickbacks for privatization and the web of relations between politicians, tycoons and security organs. The authenticity of the documents has not been confirmed while several persons mentioned in the files questioned the authenticity of the information it brings. The material appeared on the Internet shortly before Christmas.
SITA