The General Prosecutor’s Office has dropped charges against a female notary identified only as D. N. who had been accused by the team investigating the so-called Gorilla file of abuse of power by a public official. The prosecutor dropped the charge on August 14 citing a motion filed by the notary herself, the SITA newswire wrote.
“The reason for the move was the fact that the accused, as a notary, did not have the status of public official at the time the [alleged] crime was committed,” spokesperson for the General Prosecutor’s Office Vladimíra Gedrová said, as quoted by SITA. The office has ordered the police investigator to re-open the case and decide its fate.
The notary was accused in connection with a case in which Jirko Malchárek, a former economy minister (November 2005-July 2006), acquired a property in an expensive residential district area of Bratislava. Malchárek’s name features in the so-called Gorilla file, a document published on the internet that purports to include transcripts of conversations covertly recorded by Slovakia’s SIS spy agency in 2005 and 2006 between representatives of the Penta financial group and several influential Slovak public figures, including Malchárek. The notary had been the only person charged over the case thus far.
According to the Sme daily, she was accused in June, allegedly for illegally certifying a memorandum relating to the land on which Malchárek’s villa stands. She complained about the way in which her office was raided, which occurred without the oversight of the notaries’ chamber, and argued that notaries became public officials only in 2006, while the alleged crime was committed in 2003, according to the Hospodárske Noviny daily.
Sources: SITA, Sme, Hospodárske Noviny
Compiled by Zuzana Vilikovská from press reports
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