The Ministry of Finance apparently approved the purchase of the dilapidated building at 51 Litijska Street, despite knowing full well that the controversial purchase was incompatible with the Public Finance Act. The Minister of Finance, Klemen Boštjančič, is even alleged to have encouraged the purchase. We are also following up on more than blatant untruths said by Boštjančič in the National Assembly regarding the purchase of the dilapidated building on Litijska Street.
The purchase of the dilapidated building at 51 Litijska Street is the biggest affair of the Robert Golob government. The Ministry of Justice spent 7.7 million euros to buy a building that does not meet the needs of the judiciary. The previous owner of the building paid only 1.7 million euros for the building in 2020. In addition to the Ministry of Justice and the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Finance, headed by Klemen Boštjančič, was a key link in the purchase.
The funds for the purchase of the dilapidated building were provided by the Ministry of Finance, from the budget reserve. Why? Because the funds for the purchase were not planned in the 2023 budget, nor were they planned in the two supplementary budget amendments of May and August 2023.
And – this is also important – the budget reserve is intended exclusively to finance expenditure incurred in case of an emergency. The purchase of a dilapidated building in Ljubljana, which, as the Minister for Justice, Andreja Katič, has admitted, is not adequate for the needs of the judiciary and is in need of extensive renovation, is not even close to being one of these expenses.
As MP Zvone Černač of the Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS) said at a press conference, “If the Minister of Finance had acted in accordance with the law and had not proposed a reallocation of funds – an unlawful reallocation of funds from the budgetary reserve, that is – this harmful purchase of the dilapidated building on 51 Litijska Street would certainly not have happened.”
In the interpellation on the work and accountability of the Finance Minister, the SDS party accuses the Minister of a number of irregularities. Among other things, it accuses him of actions which have elements of the offence of negligent work in office, damage to public funds, misleading the public and abuse of office.
Had the Ministry of Finance been informed that this is an illegal purchase?
According to our information, the Ministry of Finance had previously been clearly informed that the deadlines for the opening of the new project (i.e. the purchase of the building at 51 Litijska Street) had already passed. This means that the purchase of the dilapidated building – if it had been carried out in accordance with the regulations – would have been unfeasible. However, the Ministry of Finance supposedly explained that it would treat all documents as exceptions and would still approve them, despite the clear provisions in the regulations.
There is also an email which clearly shows that in the last days of last year, the Minister of Finance, in full knowledge, encouraged this, even offering the assistance of officials from the Finance Ministry in the work that was being done at the Ministry of Justice.
Did the Minister lie in the National Assembly?
Even the Finance Minister himself admitted that something was seriously wrong with the purchase. Namely, he said at a meeting of the National Assembly’s Committee on Finance on the 23rd of September 2024: “I absolutely think that everything was wrong with the Litijska Street building purchase. It was a disaster. I myself think that organised crime is behind it, because this could not have been carried out by a single person.”
Finance Minister Boštjančič, of course, excluded himself from the claims about “organised crime”. At the same meeting of the Committee on Finance, he said: “Yes, it is a fact that this project has been in the pipeline at the Ministry of Justice since at least June 2023. The problem for the Ministry of Finance is that we did not know this until the beginning of December. We were never informed by the Ministry, not even when we proposed the reallocation of the funds to the government. We did not have the information from the Ministry of Justice that this project had been in the works since June.”
However, this – more than obviously – cannot be true. The Minister almost certainly should have been aware of the project much earlier.
The Ministry of Finance was already aware of the activities and space needs of the Ministry of Justice at the beginning of 2023. The draft law on amendments and additions to the Law on Administrative Disputes clearly shows the need to provide adequate premises for the exercise of judicial authority. The draft amendment to the Law on Administrative Disputes was approved by the government on the 2nd of February 2023, and was also approved by Minister Boštjančič, so he must have been aware of the proposal and the intentions to acquire premises.
Moreover, in October, when Minister Boštjančič was also the interim Minister of Public Administration, a meeting was supposedly held at the premises of the Ministry of Public Administration to discuss the bid submitted by the company Rajski vrt, d.o.o., which had applied for the building at 51 Litijska Street in Ljubljana, in response to a non-binding public call for tenders. The meeting was reportedly attended by a female staff member who, according to our source, said that she would inform the then-Minister of Public Administration of the exact content of the meeting.
The Ministry of Justice at the time decided to abandon the new court building project and instead opted for an alternative scenario, former Justice Minister Dominika Švarc Pipan told the Committee on Justice in October 2023. “For objective reasons, it just makes sense for us to somehow move ahead now and prepare this scenario, we already have some options in Ljubljana and we will be able to present this scenario in detail in a relatively short period of time, ” Švarc Pipan said.
Finally, a meeting was supposedly held at the beginning of November at the Ministry of Finance, which was attended by representatives of the Ministry of Finance. According to our source, the meeting was held to discuss obtaining financial resources for the purchase of the building at 51 Litijska Street.
What does the Minister have to say about all this?
To summarise: Our sources claim that the Minister was clearly warned about the purchase of the dilapidated, non-compliant building, and they also claim that the Minister encouraged the purchase of the building in December 2023. It is also highly unlikely that the Minister was unaware of the pending purchase of the dilapidated building, given the publicly available information and the sources’ claims.
We have sent a request for a response to these claims to the Ministry of Finance. We will publish the response when we receive it.
Ž. K.
