ENTREPRENEUR and former MP for the ruling Smer party Bohumil Hanzel filed a criminal motion with the General Prosecutor’s Office against an unknown offender for death threats that he received, but decided to withdraw it after a person admitted writing the threatening e-mail and apologised.
“At least this once shut up,” the e-mail began, as quoted by the SITA newswire, “all of us, your acquaintances, know that had you not been in Smer, you would have been a big nothing, and not Q-EX [the firm owned by Mr. Hanzel].”
Ján Majer, a former deputy speaker of parliament, admitted writing the e-mail and apologised to Hanzel, saying that “in a hard illness and under the influence of various scribbles by journalists I wrote him an e-mail which was meant only as a warning, I surely didn’t want to intimidate”, the Sme daily wrote.
In response, Hanzel said of Majer that he was a simple person who acted in this case under the influence of information in the media.
“If it was really him. One can never rule out that it was someone else,” Hanzel told the TASR newswire. Hanzel believed, upon receiving the e-mail, that the threats were related to the issue of Smer’s questionable financing in 2002, which he had brought to light in an earlier interview with Sme.
He told Sme that party leader Robert Fico, now prime minister, personally secured donations to Smer of up to Sk100 million from sponsors before the 2002 elections and that these were not declared as party income in official reports.
