Fico’s crackdown on rule of law continues, corrupt prosecutor freed
Former Slovak Special Prosecutor Dušan Kováčik was released from prison on Wednesday, August 7th 2024. He had been serving time for accepting bribes from a crime boss and for misuse of power in a case known as “Mills of God.” Kováčik was convicted of these crimes by the Supreme Court of Slovak Republic in May 2022 and sentenced to eight years in minimum security prison.
Slovakia’s government also confirmed last week that it would disband a police agency tasked with investigating the associates of ruling party politicians.
Those were only the most recent in a series of controversial decisions that analysts have highlighted as signs that the country is backsliding in its fight against organized crime and corruption under Prime Minister Robert Fico.
“In the areas of the fight against corruption and [for] the rule of law, Slovakia has experienced a continuous negative turn since last year’s parliamentary elections, manifested not only in the weakening of legislation and institutions, but also in the government coalition’s evident efforts to ensure impunity for its people,” Michal Piško, director of Transparency International Slovakia, said.
Fico previously served as prime minister from 2012 to 2018, when he resigned following mass protests over the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová. Kuciak had been investigating links between organized crime and Slovak politicians.
Fico returned to power after his Smer-SD party won enough votes to form a coalition government in October of last year. Since then, his government has passed a controversial Penal Code reform, lowering sentences and statutes of limitations for corruption. The reform was suspended while the country’s Constitutional Court evaluated it. However, last week, on August 6th, the court decided that there are no major discrepancies between the reform and the country’s constitution, and therefore the controversial penal code reform could go into effect.
The government also abolished the Office of the Special Prosecutor, which oversaw the cases investigated by the elite unit NAKA. Now, NAKA, an elite police unit tasked with investigating serious crimes, including political corruption, is to be dissolved, too.
Katarína Batková, lawyer from the Via Iuris organization, believes that all of these moves “are a continuation of the government’s previous interventions in the functioning of the rule of law in Slovakia. Under the pretext of correcting the wrongs of previous years, the government is taking such steps and measures, which not only now, but especially in the future, will mean a complete loss of confidence of the people of Slovakia in the idea that the laws apply equally to everyone.”
A corrupt prosecutor is out of jail…
Many Slovaks had high hopes for reform after the 2018 protests forced Fico out of office and law enforcement agencies launched a crackdown on crime and corruption. Authorities arrested more than 130 people connected to the previous Fico government, and more than 40 have been convicted so far. Among those was former special prosecutor Dušan Kováčik, who was released this Thursday after an intervention by Justice Minister Boris Susko (Smer-SD).
Kováčik was the Special Prosecutor from 2004 until 2020, holding the office established to fight organized crime and high-level corruption. Instead, he was found guilty of accepting a bribe of 50,000 euros in the summer of 2017, in exchange for which he ensured that a boss of an organized criminal group, “Takáčovci,” would not be taken into custody. He also leaked information to this group. (He is also facing corruption charges in another case.)
Susko filed an extraordinary appeal to the Supreme Court on behalf of Dušan Kováčik. Susko also took it upon himself to temporarily suspend Kováčik’s sentence while the Supreme Court decides how to rule on the appeal.
In theory, the Supreme Court could decide to reject the appeal, in which case Kováčik would return to prison. However, Kováčik was released on Wednesday without any conditions – he does not have to wear a monitoring device and is not legally bound to stay in Slovakia. In the past, several high-level officials charged with various crimes fled the country to evade justice, and several are hiding in Bosnia and Herzegovina, taking advantage of the lengthy extradition process.
Should the Supreme Court accept the minister’s appeal, a retrial of Kováčik’s case would follow. In the event of a retrial, the newly reformed Penal Code would apply.
The Ministry of Justice did not reply to our questions, nor did Boris Susko provide any comment to any of the established media outlets in Slovakia. Instead, he opted for a 4-minute long video released on Facebook:
“In the past few years, we have witnessed politicized trials, unlawful detentions, human rights violations, manipulated investigations…,” the minister stated, claiming that these allegedly political trials were mostly based on the testimony of people who themselves were facing trial and were therefore trying to gain lower sentences by testifying against others — so-called “kajúcnici” (penitents). Boris Susko claimed such testimonies were the only evidence for sentencing of many people: “In this way, the previous government was sending the political competition to the prison,” Susko claimed.
But in the case of Dušan Kováčik, the key testimony was not made by a “penitent,” or a person trying to gain advantage with his testimony. Rather, the key witness was another prosecutor without any criminal charges against her at all.
“This is a standard institute of our legal system,” Susko claimed of the extraordinary appeal he filed. There are no other known high profile cases with a similarly suspended sentence.
“In the decision of the Minister of Justice, it is certainly worth noting that he did not wait for the verdict of the Supreme Court with his decision. The convicted, Dušan Kováčik, approached the court with a similar request for release some time ago, but the court hesitated to release him. It is not a good signal for the public that the Minister of Justice is bypassing the judiciary and taking the decision upon himself,” Xénia Makarová, an analyst at the Let’s Stop Corruption Foundation, said.
Dušan Kováčik himself did not respond to any questions upon his release from the prison in Dubnica nad Váhom. “I want to thank all the members of the prison guard,” he said to the journalists, adding that he has little information regarding his release and would therefore not comment on it.
Later, however, he gave an interview to Miriam Šramová, who works as a parliamentary assistant to Ivan Ševčík, a member of the governing coalition. Šramová releases non-critical interviews with the government politicians to her YouTube channel. In the interview, Kováčik called for stricter charges against and punishments for those who originally investigated his crimes.
…and those who investigated him are out of a job
Kováčik’s release from prison came just one day after news broke that the whole NAKA – the elite police unit that was tasked with investigation of serious crimes, including high-level corruption, and that investigated all especially politically sensitive cases, including not only that of Dušan Kováčik, but also the murders of Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová – will be abolished by the end of August.
NAKA will follow the fate of the Office of the Special Prosecutor, which was also abolished earlier this year. Until 2020, it was led by Special Prosecutor Dušan Kováčik, who resigned only after he was arrested in the “Mills of God” case.
Afterward, the Office pressed charges in many sensitive cases, earning the wrath of Robert Fico, who likened the prosecutors working there to Gestapo officers.
One of those prosecutors, Michal Šúrek, oversaw several critical cases, including the one in which former President of the Police Force Pavol Gašpar and his relative Norbert Bödör, an oligarch close to Smer-SD party, were charged with creating and leading an organized criminal group inside Slovakia’s law enforcement agencies. Gašpar is now an MP for Smer-SD. Earlier this year, he was considered for the position of the chief of the Slovak secret service SIS (Slovak Information Service) — a position that was eventually handed to his son, Pavol Gašpar, instead.
In the past, Šúrek also oversaw the corruption case against Dušan Kováčik. However, should the case be reopened, he will not continue to work on it. On Tuesday of this week, he was suspended by the General Prosecutor.
One week earlier, Šúrek was formally accused of misuse of power, as were two investigators from NAKA and the former NAKA director. The formal accusation came from the Bureau of the Inspection Service at the Ministry of Interior, led by Matúš Šutaj Eštok (Hlas-SD), who has long been in open conflict with these investigators.
Andrea Dobiášová, a ministry spokesperson, said the officers face up to 12 years in prison, adding that she could not provide further information “due to the ongoing procedural actions.”
“I have never committed anything, and I also do not even understand what am I being accused of,” former NAKA director Ľubomír Daňko said. Daňko left his position and the police force in December 2023, when the new police president let him know he was not needed in NAKA anymore as director or even as a common investigator.
Former prosecutor Matúš Harkabus, who oversaw the case involving the murders of Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová but resigned from his position after the abolition of the Special Prosecutor’s Office earlier this year, considers the accusation unjustifiable: “Michal Šúrek is unjustifiably being prosecuted for something that can at most be improper official procedure, without the intention of causing damage or benefiting anyone, and therefore it is not a criminal act,” he said.
Twenty-three current and former investigators have signed a statement in support of their colleagues accused by the Bureau of the Inspection Service. “We consider [them] to be honest, courageous and above all fair investigators, whose zeal for a more fair Slovakia got them into [this] situation… We believe that there is still good in this world worth fighting for,” the policemen and policewomen wrote last Friday.
On Tuesday this week, news broke that all who signed this statement will be reassigned. The ministry has partially backtracked, claiming they will not be reassigned to the lowest district departments, as was previously reported, but did not deny they will indeed be reassigned.
We have approached the Ministry of Interior with several questions, including how they respond to the criticism from opposition parties, who insist that all of these actions are acts of vengeance.
“More detailed information on the planned next phase of the reorganization of the Police Force will only be available after all necessary steps have been taken to implement it. However, we can say that the goal of the overall reorganization of the Police Force is a purposeful and efficient distribution of forces and resources,” the press department replied.
Cover photo: Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico (right) with the Minister of Justice Boris Susko on July 9, 2024. Source: Úrad vlády Slovenskej republiky/Facebook
Shorter version of this article was published on occrp.org
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Tomáš Madleňák is a Slovak journalist who has worked for the Investigative Center of Ján Kuciak since 2020. He is based in Bratislava.