Thursday’s main hearing in the Trenta case also did not provide any tangible new information that would confirm the possible controversial nature of the sale of the property in 2005 and its subsequent inclusion in Janša’s purchase of the three-bedroom apartment sometime later.
The President of the Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS), Janez Janša, one of the three defendants in this trial, made a statement to the press before the main hearing started, saying: “Prosecutor Valenčič is wasting his time inflating an empty bag in the Trenta trial. The same prosecutor is directing the investigation into the corrupt purchase of the dilapidated court building on Litijska Street. In that case, he is like a dead fish, not even reacting to the criminal charge of the Minister of Finance Boštjančič himself, who said/admitted a few days ago that the crime was committed by (his) organised crime group. The purchase and renovation of premises for courts is a real hotbed of corruption. In Maribor, instead of the market price of 4 million, 6 million were paid, and in Jesenice, for the renovation of 700 square metres, 3,500 euros per square metre were paid. For that price, a new building could have been built there. And now you expect the judges who work in these corrupt premises to judge the perpetrators fairly and independently?”
He then had to continue his journey to Ljubljana at 10 a.m., as there were two important sessions of the National Assembly held that day. Due to his age and illness, Alojz Zupančič did not attend the hearing, so the first person to take the stand was Breda Zorko, the appraiser. The Specialised State Prosecutor’s Office is charging the former director of the Imos company, Branko Kastelic, with criminal abuse to the detriment of Imos, and Klemen Gantar and Janša with aiding and abetting the former. In 2005, Janša bought a large apartment in Ljubljana from the company Imos, which he financed by offering his previous one-bedroom apartment, and the amount of the second instalment was allegedly given by the company to Janša through – according to the prosecution – a sham deal with a 15,000 square metre plot of land in Trenta. Since the land is part of the Triglav National Park and, according to the prosecutors, only the replacement construction of an old farm is allowed on it, the prosecution believes that Imos, which bought Janša’s real estate indirectly through the company Eurogradnje, overpaid for it by a considerable amount. The then-director of Imos is alleged to have harmed his company by around 110,000 euros, with Janša and Gantar helping him to do so.
The court did not allow questions regarding the Litijska affair
The court appraiser, Breda Zorko, became the subject of media coverage shortly after the appraisal itself, with some media outlets hinting at her membership in the SDS party, which we are informed ended in 2013. Well, the association of the appraiser with Janša, on the grounds that she might be biased in favour of the former owner of the plot, turned out to be the other way around: it was Zorko who valued the property at by far the lowest value, namely around 17,500 euros market value, or even a little over 13,000 euros liquidation value. Such a low valuation provoked a question from the defence as to how Imos could then have sold the land for 7.5 times that amount if, according to the defence, the real market price was less than 20 thousand euros. She referred to international standards for determining market value but was not given any guidance. She noted that the valuation was carried out for the purposes of the insolvency proceedings, which provide for the accelerated sale of assets in the bankruptcy estate.
Well, it is worth noting that Zorko seemed rather nervous in her responses, and she also mentioned the media pressure on her family. She replied to questions from the defence that she had never been to an auction and that she was not interested in the price at which the properties she had appraised were then sold. She added that it was none of her business what the buyer then paid for the property, but added the use of the land of the property may “miraculously” change later. Here, she may have been alluding to the practice of the Ljubljana Mayor Zoran Janković between the lines. Well, it is the big difference between the “market value” given by the valuers and the purchase value, which shows how much the buyers (who probably don’t know about the valuation?) are willing to pay for the same property, that might give many people pause for thought.
The same applies to the case of the dilapidated court building on Litijska Street in Ljubljana. Lawyer Franci Matoz tried to get the appraiser to comment on Odlazek’s Necenzurirano (Uncensored) web portal’s reporting that she had also valued the notorious Litijska building, initially at 2.9 million euros in 2017, but last year at almost 8 million euros. The appraisal was commissioned by the previous owner, Sebastjan Vežnaver, signed by the forensic appraiser, Anton Rigler, and carried out by Zorko. According to the aforementioned web portal, which is sympathetic to the Golob government, even the photos of last year’s valuation are the same as in 2017.
Well, the judge refused to allow any questions about this, saying that it was not the subject of these proceedings (the prosecutor, Boštjan Valenčič, had also reacted negatively to these questions before her), and then she sent all but two members of the Chamber out of the chamber. After five minutes, the Chamber decided not to allow the question on the valuation of the building on Litijska Street. This, in fact, only further confirmed what Janša had said to the media before the hearing started, that Valenčič is directing the investigation in the Litijska case and that the main target of the investigation should be the Finance Minister Klemen Boštjančič, who was (and still is) at least as involved in the affair as former Justice Minister Dominika Švarc Pipan was.
Perko Brvar: The price in Trenta was not too high
On Thursday, the court also heard the former director of Imos, Barbara Perko Brvar, who was in this position for less than a year, as well as one of the former co-owners and long-time supervisor of Imos, Janez Zorman. Their testimony was apparently of no interest to the media. Perko Brvar said that at that time, they had a restructuring programme in place and had therefore adopted a plan to sell as much real estate as possible to cover their debts. In 2013, due to the change in the banks’ lending policies (in 2009 and later), the situation in the real estate market was already significantly different. Until 2009, they were actively borrowing and buying, then a lot changed, and Imos found itself in a difficult situation. They had full confidence in the banks for loans, but also in the company’s financiers.
What is essential, however, according to Ms Perko Brvar, is that Imos could not have been harmed by the purchase and subsequent sale of the land in Trenta for 120 thousand euros, as the prosecutors suggest, and even less that the Trenta case would have driven Imos into bankruptcy. At that time, the company’s financial reserves – in addition to the money in its accounts, its ownership of real estate and its receivables from customers – amounted to tens of millions of euros. All the transactions related to Trenta were carried out by Imos’ finance department and the managers were not involved in the details of the purchase, she added. They were not warned of the restrictions on developing land in the Triglav National Park. The previous director, Branko Kastelic, had drawn up an ambitious plan, which was approved by the Supervisory Board, but this was in 2005 and 2006. She did not consider the price of the land in Trenta to be unusually high, nor was she aware of the valuation by Nikolaja Gilčvert Kogovšek.
Were Zorman’s statements really forged?
The last witness to testify was Janez Zorman, a long-time construction entrepreneur from Domžale, co-founder and co-owner of Imos and its long-time supervisor. He appointed Kastelic as director of Imos in 1998, with the aim of establishing Imos on the European market and obtaining licences. As a result, Imos bought, among others, the Litostroj and Tobačna buildings, but was practically only involved in larger investments, and those of less than half a million euro were not even checked by the Supervisory Board. He said that he had not discussed the Trenta case with anyone. He had only found out about the case through the media, he said. He was also critical of the prosecutors for their apparent lack of mathematical skills, and he got into a rather heated debate with the judge – the president of the Chamber, Cvetka Posilovič, as she pointed out his alleged statements at the time of the investigation, which Zorman said were not his own, but were forgeries. He said that he had never made any statements about the land deal in Trenta. He was also critical of the fact that some people had valued the land so lowly and had not taken into account the tourist attractions of this part of Slovenia.
The hearing ended just after 3 p.m., and the next hearing is scheduled for the 15th of October, when the examination of witnesses will resume.
Interlude: Senica to be retried in Maribor?
As the author of the article you are reading now raised the case of the unusual end of the trial of Miro Senica and Hilda Tovšak on the margins of the previous hearing (that was held on the 17th of September), a few days later, he received a request for a correction from the Specialised State Prosecutor’s Office, claiming that it was not true that the charges against Senica and Tovšak had been dropped. Well, it was all written in a somewhat ambiguous way, because the media reports so far indicated that there was no crime in the case of the Bužekijan farm (which was confirmed by Milena Kosi in her expert opinion), which is why the indictment was withdrawn. Well, in 2021, when this withdrawal took place, a new indictment was allegedly filed in connection with the misuse of the Delamaris shares, which also related to the Bužekijan farm deal (now called something else). During the break, Valenčič himself approached the author of these lines and informed him that Senica’s trial would soon start in Maribor. And perhaps it was also possible to detect between the lines an acknowledgement that all these stories involving Miro Senica were not sufficiently interconnected and that this is why the trial fell through in 2021. We will soon see if anything will come out of this.
Gašper Blažič
