Branko Grims, the president of the Commission for the Supervision of Intelligence and Security Services, has announced that the commission has already carried out its duty with regards to the money laundering in NLB and sent all materials and data it gathered to the competent authorities. Now they expect that the latter will fully investigate the matter and determine in which cases the law was broken and who is responsible so that these people can be brought before a court.
“Yesterday the question was who has the power to arrange the laundering of a billion dollars, because a boss in a bank definitely doesn’t simply come up with this due to some bad sleep – someone somewhere arranges it; but now ask yourself who has the power to succeed in having practically all supervisory mechanisms, supervisory institutions, and law enforcement institutions in Slovenia fail. Because that’s exactly what happened,” stressed Grims.
According to Grims, the Slovene Intelligence and Security Agency provided the correct information at the end of the year, i.e. before the accounts were closed, when this was still happening. It sent it to key people – the then Slovenian president Danilo Türk, prime minister Borut Pahor, finance minister Franc Križanič, interior minister Katarina Kresal, director general of the Slovenian police, and the foreign minister and advisor to the president in this area. “Nothing happened. But it should be kept in mind that this was the only comprehensive warning that was given at all. It also included numbers about what was involved, which is why it should have set alarm bells ringing. How many similar stories involving a billion dollars or three quarters of a billion euros have been discovered in Slovenia in the period after its independence? This has been the only one so far. In other words, the extent was crucial, and it should have set alarm bells ringing. Interestingly, documents have been uncovered in which zeroes are missing, i.e. they say that €700 thousand were involved when it was actually €700 million. And of course, this also resulted in a different treatment and different actions by the competent people.”
H. M.