The National Assembly’s Commission of Inquiry for determining the potential political responsibility of holders of public office with regard to the alleged inadmissible political interference in the work of the Police and other competent state authorities, where the coalition has a majority, has arbitrarily decided that Prime Minister Robert Golob does not need to be questioned in relation to this case.
Avoiding the hearings, lying and usurping the rules according to its own criteria have become the normal modus operandi of the current authorities. In order to get Prime Minister Robert Golob out of his predicament, his party, the Freedom Movement (Gibanje Svoboda), which heads the Commission of Inquiry in question, absolved him of any responsibility, using the transparent excuse that “the supposed motive of the Prime Minister to influence the change of the date of the arrest of the Russian spies is not plausible.”
The Commission, according to its Chair MP Aleš Rezar of the Freedom Movement party, establishes a motive before questioning witnesses, which was not proven in this case. MP Rezar also said that Golob had not been in communication with the director of the Slovenian Intelligence and Security Agency (SOVA), Joško Kadivnik.
The alleged influence of the Prime Minister on the arrest of Russian spies was reported by former Interior Minister Tatjana Bobnar and former Acting Director-General of the Police Boštjan Lindav at a secret session of the same Commission. On Wednesday, Rezar described their testimony as false, and their motive was “either to discredit the highest political actor, the Prime Minister, or even to influence the judicial process of the arrest of the spies, i.e. to protect the Russian spies, which is even more worrying.”
Today, the National Assembly’s Commission of Inquiry adopted an interim report which, according to Rezar, states that from the 18th of November until the arrest of the Russian spies, there was no trace of communication between the Prime Minister and the director of the Slovenian Intelligence and Security Agency, Kadivnik, which was supposedly what both Bobnar and Lindav claimed in their testimonies.
“The date of the arrest was always the same, it did not change,” Rezar stated. It was determined on the basis of operational and tactical reasons or motives and was coordinated with the foreign intelligence agency.
The motive allegedly given by Bobnar and Lindav, that the date of the arrest was postponed in order not to overshadow the post-referendum day, is, according to Rezar, nonsensical. “The Slovenian Intelligence and Security Agency does not hold press conferences after an operation and continues its secret work of monitoring communication networks even after the operation itself, so this information would not have reached the media on that day in any case and, as such, is refuted in terms of motive,” he said.
“The conclusion of this interim report is that the Prime Minister never actually had the opportunity to influence the operational and tactical details and thus delay the timing of the operation,” he concluded, adding that “today, we are discussing the proven false allegations of Bobnar and Lindav.”
Opposition members obstructed today’s meeting of the Commission of Inquiry and the adoption of the interim report, as they were not aware of the contents of the interim report. They therefore accused Rezar and the coalition, among other things, of rushing the adoption of the report.
Rezar described the opposition’s move as “political theatre” and said that the adoption of the interim report and the fact that the Prime Minister would not be questioned by the Commission of Inquiry were “in no way” affected by the recent criminal charges brought against the Prime Minister by the police.
C. Š.
