At Monday’s hearing in the Trenta case at the Celje court, it became clear that the trial will continue at least until April, as three witnesses have still not responded to the summons to be heard. They are still trying to re-interview Branka Remškar, the former bankruptcy trustee of the Imos company, who already testified once last year, and now two former employees of the company Eurogradnje are to be questioned.
The trial was held in the absence of Janez Janša, who was taking part in an extraordinary session of the National Assembly on Monday. However, Dušan Drstvenšek and Špela Tavčar, who were allegedly in charge of financial transactions at Imos at the time when the company bought Janša’s former estate, appeared as witnesses. Meanwhile, the President of the Chamber, Cvetka Posilovič, indicated that the trial could also end after the hearings in April – if the witnesses respond – as there are no new evidentiary motions from either the prosecution or the defence.
But Drstvenšek obviously disappointed the prosecutors, because he actually remembered very little. At the time, he was supposedly a member of the management college at Imos, but he was in charge of the executive operations in the field of construction, and he was not involved in real estate acquisitions. Most of what he knows about the Trenta case is from the media. He confirmed that Trenta was discussed more casually at the College meetings because it was a relatively small project, as such land was bought on a stock basis, and the purchase price was much lower than for large projects such as Litostroj, the building in Stegne, where the headquarters of the Slovenian Intelligence and Security Agency (SOVA) are now located, etc. As he was not directly involved in the real estate transactions, he did not deal with this information in detail, he had only heard of the appraiser, Nikolaja Gilčvert Kogovšek, and he knew nothing about the links with the Fiesa project and the advances allegedly linked to the Trenta affair.
The witnesses explained: nothing incriminating
Drstvenšek did talk a little about Janša’s purchase of an apartment at 34 Komenskega Street in the Trubarjev Kvart housing estate, which was built in 2005, but many buyers had already booked their apartments earlier, so there were few apartments on the open market in the neighbourhood. This is also why they knew a little more about the specific names of the buyers of these apartments. According to Drstvenšek, Janša had bought an apartment that was not so attractive for buyers, so Imos was happy about this decision. However, the employees of the Security and Protection Centre had carried out a security check of the apartment, as Janša was Prime Minister at the time. Meanwhile, Drstvenšek himself had never talked to Janša about the business in question.
Finally, the judge presiding over the Chamber wanted to know whether any of the accused had tried to influence the witness, which he explicitly denied.
In the next part of the trial, Špela Tavčar, who worked in the main office of Imos, denied knowing anything about the Trenta case and the financial transactions related to it, as she had just come back from maternity leave in the summer of 2005. As is customary, the questions were mainly asked by the judge, while prosecutors Boštjan Valenčič and Luka Moljk and the defence (with the exception of lawyer Gorazd Fišer) hardly spoke.
In short, nothing new came from this hearing, but we did see a repetition of a well-known fact: that the deal with the former Tonder farmhouse in Trenta with all the land attached was a “side deal” for the Imos company at the time, and nobody thought much about the assumption that this deal could in any way be controversial.
Gašper Blažič
