Speaker of Parliament Boris Kollár holds a press briefing on June 23, 2020, in Bratislava, explaining his plagiarism. (source: TASR)
Within a span of a few hours, two ruling coalition politicians have been faced with plagiarism accusations, including Slovakia’s Speaker of Parliament and Sme Rodina leader, Boris Kollár.
His party colleague, who recently stepped down from her post as the government's plenipotentiary after just a few days since appointment, Petra Krištúfková, reportedly plagiarised her thesis too.
The former leader of the Spolu party, Miroslav Beblavý, was the first to point to what he labelled Krištúfková’s plagiarism of her undergraduate thesis. Then, the news website Aktuality.sk reported on Kollár’s plagiarised master’s thesis.
“I admit to it. It’s not nice, and I apologise,” Kollár said. He added that he was busy when he was working on his dissertation and that every student seeks to make things easier for themselves.
Krištúfková and Kollár both studied at the private University of Central Europe in the western-Slovak town of Skalica. Their thesis supervisor was Jozef Minďas, whose books Kollár copied the most in his thesis. Kollár graduated in 2015, Krištúfková last year.
It is not the first time a speaker of parliament has been accused of plagiarism. Andrej Danko, Kollár’s predecessor, was labelled a plagiarist in 2018.
