The fact that the Commission of Inquiry of the National Assembly investigating the Prime Minister’s business dealings is headed by members of his own party is, of course, unique in Europe and the world. The National Assembly’s Commission of Inquiry for determining the alleged financial exhaustion of the company GEN-I, alleged controversial practices related to the company Star Solar, alleged illegal financing of the political party Freedom Movement (Gibanje Svoboda), and alleged illegal financing of the electoral campaign of the same party for the regular elections to the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia in 2022 has thus, as expected, turned into a farce.
The Commission of Inquiry – absurdly – has more members from the Prime Minister’s Freedom Movement party than from the largest opposition party – the Slovenian Democratic Party (Slovenska demokratska stranka – SDS). The Freedom Movement party has seven members in the Commission, the SDS five, while the Social Democrats (Socialni demokrati – SD) and the New Slovenia party (Nova Slovenija – NSi) have one each. Even before this, the establishing of the Commission of Inquiry was something that the coalition fiercely resisted. Now that they are in charge of the Commission, however, the systematic stalling has begun. So far, the Commission has held only three meetings.
The Commission recently met for the first time in six months (!). Again, with the intention of stalling. Lawyer Miha Kunič has been appointed as the new expert associate of the Commission, and he will be in charge of preparing the legal opinion with which Lah will respond to the SDS party’s request for the hearing of 70 witnesses.
The Chairman of the Commission, Tomaž Lah, was also supposed to be among those questioned, but he would have had to resign as Chairman if he had been questioned, as the law on parliamentary investigations stipulates that witnesses may not take part in the work of the commissions. Therefore, the SDS party called on Lah to step down as Chairman of the Commission. Although a criminal complaint was also filed against him some time ago, Lah did not step down as Chairman of the Commission, and intends to challenge the SDS party’s request for the questioning of witnesses and, consequently, for his own replacement, through the legal system.
The Freedom Movement party has devised several tactics with which they intend to slow down or derail the investigation. First, they demanded, without precedent, that the legality of the SDS party’s request be verified by an expert associate of the Commission of Inquiry, choosing the lawyer of the Čeferin law firm, Blaž Kovačič Mlinar, for the task, but then changed their minds, so that now Kunič will verify the legality. Kunič’s statements suggest that the aim of this manoeuvre is precisely to delay the process further. He said that Lah asked him to prepare a legal opinion in the field of legislation, and that he has not yet concluded a consultancy contract, so he does not know what the fee will be.
The leader of the SDS party parliamentary group, MP Jelka Godec, pointed out the obvious stalling tactics, as she wrote on X: “The request of the SDS party parliamentary group at the GEN-i investigative commission to identify several persons as witnesses, including the Chairman of the Commission from the Freedom Movement party, Tomaž Lah, must be a very complicated matter. After half a year, they have now only met for their 3rd session (meanwhile, almost a year has passed already since the establishment of the investigative body); we submitted our request for witnesses in June 2024, and the members of the investigative body still do not know what to do with our request. They are now asking for help from another lawyer. In September 2024, they announced the participation of Blaž Kovačič Mlinar, and now, it is supposedly Miha Kunič. They are stalling, and none of the journalists have asked them about it yet,” she wrote and then tagged some of the biggest media houses in our country.
Zahteva @PS_SDS na preiskovalki GEN-i, da se kot priče določi več oseb, med njimi tudi predsednika preiskovalke Svobodnjaka Tomaža Laha, mora biti pa hudo zapletena zadeva. 🤔🤔😅
Po pol leta so se sestali na 3. seji (minilo bo že skoraj leto dni od ustanovitve preiskovalke), mi… pic.twitter.com/tpAksDfIh5— Jelka Godec (@jelka_godec) March 26, 2025
Why is the coalition stalling?
So, almost a year has passed since the SDS requested to hear witnesses, and in the meantime, the Commission has not met, and when it has, it has only been to delay the change of experts. It is clear that the ultimate aim is to bring the government’s mandate to a safe end. The Freedom Movement party has been fiercely opposed to the Commission from its very inception, as the activities of its President and Prime Minister Robert Golob are being investigated, as are his dealings in the GEN-I energy company, and his company Star Solar, which deals almost exclusively with the state-owned company Borzen, as well as the alleged illegal financing of his Freedom Movement in the pre-election campaign.
It should be noted that the Speaker of the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia, Urška Klakočar Zupančič, in her opposition to the establishment of the Commission of Inquiry, claimed that in this particular case, it was a political discrediting of the President of the party of which she herself is a member. For this reason, the latter herself sent the request for the establishment of a parliamentary commission to the Legislative and Legal Service of the National Assembly and submitted a bill on parliamentary inquiries, which would introduce a review of the request for a parliamentary inquiry before the Constitutional Court, should the Legislative and Legal Service find that there is any doubt as to the constitutionality of the establishing of the Commission of Inquiry. The establishment itself was also not to the liking of GEN-I, where the Prime Minister served as President of the Management Board for many years before entering the world of politics, allegedly because it would give the public access to the company’s classified information.
We want to ask an uncomfortable question for the coalition: if Golob is really innocent, why all the stalling? In criminal proceedings, it is common for lawyers to stall when the accused is clearly guilty, and the aim is to bring the case to a definitive statute of limitations, so here, too, it seems that they want to delay the investigation until the current Parliament is dissolved. Is stalling actually a tacit admission of guilt?
In light of the above, we have sent questions to the Commission about their inactivity. We wanted to know the reason for the slowness, why they have changed the lawyer who will examine the legality of the questioning of witnesses, and what the lawyer’s fee will be.
I. K.
