THE OFFICE of the General Prosecutor has dropped charges against a notary identified only as D.N. who was accused of abuse of power by a public official. The notary had been the only person to face charges arising from investigation of the Gorilla file, the SITA newswire reported on August 22. The Gorilla file is an unverified document allegedly produced by the SIS intelligence agency which purports to describe high-level corruption among senior government officials in 2005-6.
“The reason for the move was the fact that the accused, as a notary, did not have the status of a public official at the time the [alleged] crime was committed,” said Vladimíra Gedrová, a spokesperson for the Office of the General Prosecutor, as quoted by SITA. The actions of the notary were alleged to have occurred in 2003; notaries were legally defined as public officials only in 2006.
The prosecutor’s office ordered investigators to re-open the case.
According to the Sme daily, the notary was accused in June of illegally certifying a memorandum relating to some land which is now the site of a villa belonging to Jirko Malchárek, a former economy minister whose name features heavily in the Gorilla file.
