BRATISLAVA, August 2, (WEBNOVINY) – Independent MP and the leader of the Ordinary People movement, Igor Matovic does not think somebody wanted to manipulate his testimony on political corruption at the Prosecutor General Office last Friday and that it was intentionally shredded. „It was a human error,” he insists.
Matovic described his Friday’s interrogation by the elected but not yet appointed Prosecutor General Jozef Centes. After the questioning, Centes ordered a secretary to print a transcript of the testimony and delete it from the computer in order to prevent its possible leak. Later, Centes called Matovic to return and testify again as his testimony was allegedly mistakenly shredded.
When he returned, Matovic together with Centes tried to restore the deleted file on the computer in the office of the director of the penal department Tibor Sumichrast where the first questioning took place but in vain. Matovic said today that Sumichrast is close to Deputy Prosecutor General Dobroslav Trnka. The testimony had to be repeated, this time at Centes’ office. “My testimony was unpleasant for political parties but I do not think that there existed an intention to manipulate it. I tried to tell everything what I told before. I did not feel like somebody wanted to manipulate something. „A human error occurred,“ said Matovic.
The General Prosecution Office however stated on Monday that Matovic was lying when he said that future Prosecutor General Jozef Centes‘ secretary had accidentally shredded the written version of his first three-hour testimony. The office said that after verifying the first testimony, no administrative force manipulated its written version. “The information that they mistakenly shredded part of the file is not true, as they had no contact with it any more and someone else had done the shredding,” informed spokeswoman for the prosecutor general Jana Tokolyova. According to the General Prosecution Office, after the testimony, Matovic instructed the secretary not to save the information in digital form, but to erase the text without even saving it on a flash drive.
Igor Matovic visited the General Prosecution Office last Friday to testify about alleged corruption among politicians, about which he told the media earlier. The summons to testify was initiated by Deputy Prosecutor General Dobroslav Trnka. Matovic started addressing political corruption on July 12, when parliament was voting on his proposal to lift the duty to provide meal vouchers to employees and replace them with financial contributions that could be spent on food. Some coalition MPs, however, did not raise their hands for his proposal. Matovic said that accounts of some MPs should be audited, indicating that rich meal voucher distribution companies may be corrupting some members of parliament. He later repeated the claim, adding that he also considers political nominations, a common practice in Slovakia since the times of socialism, political corruption. According to Matovic, corrupt behavior is common in both the opposition and coalition parties.
SITA