The alliance between the Necenzurirano (Uncensored) web portal (which is owned by the tycoon Martin Odlazek) and the instant party, the Freedom Movement (Gibanje Svoboda), is so obvious that practically none of those involved even bother to hide it. Primož Cirman, one leaf of the Cirman-Vuković-Modic three-leafed clover, even chaired one of the round tables of the then-new politician Robert Golob. Another member of this trio – Vesna Vuković – became Secretary-General of the Freedom Movement party, but she was already on Golob’s payroll before then, having been paid 103,000.00 euros by the Gen-I energy company (which Golob used to head before he became Prime Minister) in a transaction that still remains unexplained today (even though the money is indirectly ours, as Gen-I is a state-owned company, financed from taxes, too). The third member of the same media executions team has also become an important link in this “freedom” chain – he has been appointed by the current government to the position of an expert associate in the Commission of Inquiry of the National Assembly, which is investigating suspicions of illegal financing of parties’ electoral campaigns before the last national parliamentary elections.
It now seems that it was Modic who was the intermediate link that smuggled the classified data from the Financial Administration of the Republic of Slovenia (FURS) to Odlazek’s web portal Necenzurirano, where it was published as “exclusive stories from reliable sources”. We would probably never have known this if Golob had not quarrelled with one of his first and most loyal political associates, MP Mojca Šetinc Pašek, who recently sang like a canary and told reporter Uroš Slak the following:
“It was simply that they did not follow the request or the decision of the Commission of Inquiry, which we forwarded to the Financial Administration of the Republic of Slovenia, and they provided absolutely more material than we asked for. This is the problem we faced. Now, if you ask me why this happened, I can answer you as I have answered others recently, that I can only guess whether they were so diligent at the Financial Administration that when they got a request and looked at the name of a company, they sent everything they had on that company, or whether, I do not know, I can also guess, they simply got some informal instruction or informal tip and sent too much because of that informal tip. But I can only speculate and guess about that.”
Commission of Inquiry as a supervisory authority?
The testimony of Šetinc Pašek – who could now be considered a whistle-blower – is horrifying. Since Modic, the journalist of the Necenzurirano web portal, works in the Commission of Inqiury in question as an expert associate, he must have seen such documents from the Financial Administration and the Office for Money Laundering Prevention.
His investigative portal then wrote about alleged irregularities in politically targeted media that needed to be destroyed, and then these media were actually investigated by the official authorities. This appears to be a serious abuse, where both politicians and private, politically connected journalists and media outlets have conspired against alleged political opponents.
“Well, this is serious. The Commission of Inquiry is the one who orders who will be subject to a tax audit. If the Financial Administration of the Republic of Slovenia reacted to this request and carried out a tax audit, we have a big problem in the country. This can only be understood as if the members of the coalition are actually the ones ordering tax audits and then demanding that the findings be reported to them,” wrote tax expert Ivan Simič, a former director of the Financial Administration of the Republic of Slovenia, in response to recent reports about the situation.
It is important to note here that the parliamentary investigators had no real grounds or suspicions to even set up the commission, let alone to spy on documents that are considered tax secrets.
Classified Financial Administration data as “sources” for the Necenzurirano web portal
Investigative journalist Bojan Požar also pointed out that he was never questioned as a suspect during the parliamentary inquiry but that information concerning him has constantly appeared in selected media, which could only have come from classified data from the Financial Administration, which was always falsified or fabricated to conceal the real source.
But the real source was always the Financial Administration, and every document that was sent to the National Assembly had to be signed by the Director of the Financial Administration, Peter Grum. In light of this, it is interesting to note that the tax secrets were always published by the web portal Necenzurirano, where Modic, an expert associate of the Commission of Inquiry, is also employed.
The web portal Necenzurirano as a tool of the government
The Necenzurirano web portal has long been seen by the public as an outlet for left-wing politics, but in this case it seems as if they have even turned into a direct tool of politics. Never before has such a clear link been revealed between the media of the transition left, left politics and the abuse of institutions that left politicians apparently see as their post-election prey.
It was clear from the very creation of the commission of inquiry headed by MP Šetinc Pašek that it was intended to take the opposition media to task, but no one imagined that they would do so with such a clear abuse of institutions and with the help of the subservient (Odlazek’s) media. If no one is held criminally responsible for this, perhaps it is time to stop talking about Slovenia as a country where the rule of law still counts for something.
I. K.
