Marián Leško: Heger’s government hangs by a thread from Kuff’s boots (+ video) – Denník N

Another trial began with former special prosecutor Dušan Kováčik, and for the first time the public could see him in his prison uniform. It was actually a sad sight. Is that so? He was, no one can be happy when such a high official sits in the bass and for so many years. I do not want to repeat one Slovak classic who said, joy is different, it is sadness, and in the opposite guard, sadness is different, it is joy. I looked at how many times I addressed Mr. Kováčik directly in my articles. Since 2004, there have been 158 articles. For sixteen years, the man headed the special prosecutor’s office, that’s ten articles a year. Before the 2009 and 2014 parliamentary elections for the Special Prosecutor, I wrote a series of articles about why MPs should not elect him because he is unfit for the job: “Not only is he not doing what he is supposed to do, he is doing what does not have. That person does not deserve to be in such a position.” When, after all these years, I see that he received a sentence and is sitting in uniform, I thought to myself that the articles were probably not meaningless, I was probably not writing delusions, when he really got what I was talking about in the articles he wrote that it should belong to him. Now he can’t say you didn’t warn him. That is also true. I wrote some articles expressly with the intention that this is really over the top. A few days ago, they also published the judgment of the Supreme Court against Kováčik. Judge Peter Štift evaluated the special prosecutor’s motive as a “certain internal arrogance, even arrogance resulting from the previous several years of performance as a special prosecutor – the defendant could evaluate the given situation in such a way that nothing can happen to him when he is basically one of the three or of the four functionally highest-ranking prosecutors in the state”. The second factor, according to the judge, is the natural human desire for property, “when a person, although financially secure, wants to have more and more in order to increase his standard of living.” Do you think this judgment will deter constitutional officials from corrupt behavior? I’m not convinced about that. I’ve read some articles and studies, and if there’s one thing that deters people from committing crimes, it’s the certainty of punishment. They have to feel that they are taking a big risk and they have to ask themselves if it is worth it. When we look at who is behind bars in Slovakia, those people may be there with a sense of injustice. That they were not the worst or did the worst things, and yet they have to “grunt”. And all the others, who have much worse and more serious things on their backs, walk for freedom. My estimate is that for every one convicted or in preventive detention, there are perhaps 50 to 100 who have not yet been served with justice, although they should. The deterrent force of certainty of punishment does not exist in Slovakia. Here it is obvious that it is worth taking a risk, because the probability that it will fall on a person and pay for his actions is very small. Guys and girls who try it can always count on getting lucky and getting away with it. Is she still very small? Yes. I was involved in Slovak politics from the very beginning. If I were to write a list of all the crimes that took place in Slovakia with the state seal, it would be a 1,500- to 2,000-page “whip” of cases, missteps, and obvious enrichment. All previous governments, with a few exceptions, were based on the fact that some cases jumped out, but others were lost in the crowd. There was a case every three days. There are disproportionately more people who belong in the bass and should be there than those who are sitting there. The Special Prosecutor’s Office has been complaining for a long time about what the weekly Plus 7 Days, owned by Penta, is doing in the area of ​​justice. They often question prosecutors and judges without addressing them. Now they interviewed the former head of the NAKA operation, Ján Kalavský, who is on the run in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was Kalavský who started the war in the police by testifying against NAKA investigators. How did you perceive the interview? As part of an organized, thoroughly prepared and executed campaign to discredit the investigators dealing with the most serious cases. At the moment when the investigators came to the oligarchs, the political leaders, there was a reasonable resistance and a campaign against the investigators. To make us believe that they manipulated the investigations is happening on several levels. The first level is political: we know who constantly attacks the investigators and the special prosecutor’s office, who calls three or four press conferences a week just to kick the police and the prosecutors of the special prosecutor’s office. We also know how and with what one member of the government coalition helps him. We are a family. The next level is institutional. Politicians who come up with accusations about animals in NAKA or the mafia of investigators use rather false documents for this, which are supplied to them by the management of the SIS, the management of the regional prosecutor’s office and, unfortunately, also the management of the general prosecutor’s office. The third level is the media, where the media, which are in some way influenced by oligarchs or party supporters of threatened groups, create a media environment for the investigators to be said to be animals and commit ignorant crimes. In the interview, Kalavský says that he is afraid for his life, and that is why he is hiding in Bosnia. From the way you observe the decisions of the courts, the work of the police, the prosecutor’s office, is the person accused of corruption in danger of anything other than a fair assessment of what he did? I carefully read that interview and I would say that Mr. Kałavský told us This article is exclusive content for Denník N subscribers. Are you a subscriber? Log in