Nova24TV has received an unusual letter from the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia. It was sent to Anže Logar and Branko Grims before the interpellation. The letter had been written by justice minister Goran Klemenčič and state secretary Darko Stare, and you can read the full letter at the end of the article. Both of them had once been employed at the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption and had also been aware of the money laundering case at NLB, but they failed to act with due diligence, so the affair was swept under the carpet. Now they are calling on the presidents of both commissions which have discovered the controversial money laundering to show more leniency towards people that used to be instrumental in detecting corruption. But should they?
Justice minister Goran Klemenčič and his state secretary Darko Stare have poured their thoughts into a letter and sent it not only to the president of the commission of inquiry to determine the abuses in the Slovenian banking system and to determine the causes and responsibilities for the already second rehabilitation of the banking system in independent Slovenia, Anže Logar, and the president of the Commission for the Supervision of Intelligence and Security Services, Branko Grims, but also to Milan Brglez, the president of the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia.
At the very beginning of the letter, they explain that their reason for writing it lies in the suspicious transactions from Iran through NLB and in “what someone knew and what someone should have done but did not”. They stress particularly that the case is worthy of an investigation and write that the parliamentary investigation requires the involvement of competent law enforcement bodies. Commendable. But it seems that they are troubled by what has been found in the documentation that both commissions obtained in the course of their investigations. They now ask Grims and Logar to present the findings arising from the documents to the public fairly. Perhaps they have forgotten that the information has already leaked to the public and speaks for itself. Moreover, the truth which “the public has a right to know” has already been communicated to the public.
In the public hearing and debate, some deputies claimed that “the handing over of documentation about the controversial transactions by the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption has not been recorded anywhere”. Stare and Klemenčič have now decided that this is not true even though deputies supported the statement with letters from the current CPC president, who confirms it. In the public part of the session, Grims and Logar also talked about the actions of the CPC in transmitting the documentation on controversial transactions to the police. Allegedly, this involved “illegal conduct or a violation of provisions in the applicable cooperation agreement between the CPC and the police”. The authors of the letter now claim that this is not true and refer to the fact that neither of the commissions headed by Grims and Logar have the competence for such assessments. So what are the competent people doing? Even “laymen” can see the facts, so many of them must be shutting their eyes.
A. L.