In 2006-2010, Slovakia was ruled by the first government of Robert Fico. He was still with Vladimír Mečiar, whose support, despite his proclaimed rivalry, he won in exchange for guarantees of impunity and several important posts in the justice and interior ministries. The government was replaced by Iveta Radičová’s government, but only briefly.
In addition to the SDKÚ, the short-term government consisted of SaS, KDH and Most-Híd. The great victory, when the democratic parties managed to outflank Fico, Mečiar and the nationalists, was overshadowed, according to many, by a stupid and unnecessary fall. The SaS party refused to support the bailout mechanism for Greece, the so-called Euroval, while the rest of the coalition insisted on compliance with the eurozone consensus and support for the Euroval. The stubbornness of the SaS chairman was then mixed with a rather bold and ill-considered move by Radičová, who combined the vote on the Eurovall with a vote of confidence in the government, resulting in SaS MPs voting for the fall of their own government on 11 October 2011 (Radičová hoped that in order to preserve the government, the Eurovall opponents would back down).
The whole thing led to the disillusionment of the voters of the former coalition and a spectacular victory for Fico, who was able to form his second government in 2012 as a single-colour government. Neither of these stages was without corruption cases and scandals.
Velky Slavkov
One of the first episodes of Fico’s long government career was the Velký Slavkov case, which, however, concerned his coalition partner – Mečiar’s HZDS. The then deputy of the Slovak Land Fund quietly signed the transfer of lucrative plots of land in Velky Slavkov to a group of restituents. As it later turned out, their claim could be disputed. However, an even bigger problem was that these restituents immediately sold the acquired land to a group of businessmen close to the HZDS. According to police estimates, the state lost about CZK 1.5 billion in land transfers.
Tunneling Military Intelligence
The case of tunnelling of military intelligence, i.e. Slovak military intelligence, was a problem not only from the economic point of view, but also from the security point of view. Although I summarise it in the term ‘case’, later investigations showed that it was a mechanism that had been siphoning money out of the intelligence budget for almost ten years. The first suspicions began to leak out around 2013, pointing to events since 2008.
For example, the Military Intelligence Department was supposed to reconstruct its own real estate with state money. These were then designated as unnecessary and sold to private individuals close to the intelligence leadership. Other suspicions concerned fictitious or artificially inflated invoices for the supply of goods and services.
During the short reign of Iveta Radičová, suspicions began to be investigated, but after her downfall it soon ended without proving a crime. Instead, an investigation was launched into the figures who spoke about and investigated the tunnelling. These suspicions were later proved to be fabricated in the investigation.
As it turned out later in the investigation, the tunneling mechanism did not end there. In 2023, the police prepared charges against 16 people who were supposed to have embezzled 74 million euros (roughly 1.7 billion crowns) from the news service between 2013 and 2020.
Social enterprises
The case concerning support for social enterprises sounds rather cynical. The first Fico government supported their establishment from the European Social Fund. As it turned out, the eight social enterprises supported were backed by representatives of Fico’s Direction-SD.
However, Social Affairs Minister Viera Tomanová did not end up before the courts for the case and after a long media defense she withstood the criticism.
Reconstruction of Bratislava Castle
In 2008, representatives of the Direction-SD decided on a massive reconstruction project of Bratislava Castle. The dominant feature of the capital, around which important state institutions are located, was reconstructed by Váhostav of the sponsor of both the Direction and HZDS, Juraj Široký. The contract, priced at 39.8 million euros, ended up more than doubling in price to 86 million euros.
Types
Another project of the corrupters around the first Fico government was the siphoning of money from the state lottery Tipos, which was under the Ministry of Finance under the leadership of Jan Počiatek of the Direction party. The Senate of the Supreme Court, which was influenced by Štefan Harabin, ruled that Tipos was using the Sportka lottery’s know-how illegally. The court ordered compensation of 66 million euros to be paid to an unknown Cypriot shell company, Lemikon Limited. The Ministry did not defend itself against the court’s decision and promised to pay Lemikon the compensation.
After the first instalment of 16 million euros was paid, Prime Minister Fico and Minister Počiatek responded to pressure from the public, anti-corruption organisations and the media and stopped further payments. In the following years, however, attempts by the company’s representatives to obtain reimbursement of the remainder kept coming back like a boomerang. There are also suspicions about who is behind the company. This is because the company was based at the same address as the Thunderbite Holdings Limited shell company behind which the J&T group appeared.
Fico-like voice
In 2010, some media outlets described and published a leaked recording from 2002 “with a Fico-like voice”. In the recording, he boasted that he had raised a total of CZK 75 million from sponsors for the Smer-SD party. “I have secured, and I can say this here, I hope nobody is listening, I have secured 35 for this year, next year about 40 plus other things. I secured them with my own head,” he said in the recording. Fico denied that it was his voice. The case was also investigated by prosecutors, but the prosecutor’s office concluded that “the deed was not done”. To this day, this is one of the major cover-ups of the suspicions surrounding Robert Fico, with Fico referring to the media coverage of the case here and there, expressing his derision to journalists.
Ashes
Fico’s coalition partner, the SNS, has not been idle either, lest nominators and people close to the Direction-SD be alone in the cases. His environment minister Viliam Turský, who was in office only a few months after he had to replace his colleague Ján Chrbet, who was dismissed for the emissions case described below, signed a contract for the disposal of fly ash from Slovak power plants that was disadvantageous for the state. He chose the company Eco Krupina, even though it offered EUR 27 million more than competing firms. This led to criticism and public pressure, and ultimately to the SNS party taking the entire ministry away.
Causes of SDKÚ
Even the short reign of Iveta Radičová did not banish the suspicions that have existed for some time around Mikuláš Dzurinda’s SDKÚ party, whose face Radičová was at the time. It should be recalled that as early as 2004, there were reports that the party’s debts of CZK 22 million had been taken over by a private company that had not reported any activity. Moreover, it bought the party’s headquarters on credit. In 2010, as part of the election fight, Robert Fico presented proof of an EUR 800 000 loan to the company in question. The uncovering of the structure pointed to several shell companies covertly financing the SDKU’s operations.
Platinum screens
Another of the smaller cases Robert Fico used to attack his then biggest political opponent SDKÚ was the case of the purchase of platinum screens. Although these were much less significant in volume than the cases associated with Smer-SD, Fico showed an unprecedented ability to publicize these cases; he talked about them all the time, and in the end he actually sank his rivals. The “platinum sieves” case, publicised around 2010, pointed to the former economy minister Ľudovít Černák of the SDKÚ.
His distant relative bought platinum screens from the State Material Reserves Administration for 670,000 euros through the Heneken company. Experts estimated their market value at EUR 2.5 million. The tender for the sale took place in a 20-minute auction on the website of the Material Reserves Administration. Although it is mainly a well-used political capital for Robert Fico, the fact is that Černák was a controversial figure. He himself was active through his financial group, especially in the arms and real estate business (Sitno holding), and his family has been talked about in connection with several suspicious cases.
Tax Directorate Košice
Another problem that Robert Fico in particular pointed to during Radičová’s government was the case surrounding the tax directorate in Košice. The directorate decided to rent the building from Nitra Invest, a company owned by the regional director of the SDKÚ. Iveta Radičová put pressure on the head of the Košice tax office and he resigned.
Election of the Attorney General
Of the controversies from the period of Iveta Radičová’s government, the election of the Attorney General has probably had the most serious long-term consequences.
Although the coalition’s joint candidate was prosecutor Jozef Čentéš, the parliament strongly supported the controversial Dobroslav Trnka, who was mainly promoted by Směr-SD. It was obvious that the MPs of the ruling parties also voted for him. After Radičová threatened to resign if Trnka was elected, the coalition MPs elected Jozef Čentěš (the mutual distrust was so significant that the coalition MPs took photos or marked their ballots to find the one who was cooperating with the opposition).
From 2011 to 2013 there was a stalemate, when President-elect Ivan Gašparovič, who openly supported the Smer-SD, refused to name Čentáš. Čentěš appealed to the Constitutional Court. However, its decision took a long time and Fico, after coming to power in 2013, elected another of his men, Jaromír Čižnár, as prosecutor general. As the Constitutional Court’s decision later showed, Čentěš should have been appointed in 2011. However, neither President Gašparovič nor Prime Minister Fico were punished for blocking the appointment of Čentěš and appointing an illegitimate prosecutor general. The only positive aspect of the Constitutional Court’s decision was the compensation of 60,000 euros for Čentáš, who donated the entire amount to charity.
Budamar
The period of this chapter was defined in Slovakia by the arrival of the second Fico government. The latter managed to leave its calling card in the form of a case concerning large-scale tax fraud in international trade. According to investigators, in 2012 a group of people set up an organised group that formally, but fictitiously, traded in food products through a network of more than 40 companies from Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary. The link between the trading companies was the large logistics company Budamar, which is one of the main players in the logistics market in Central Europe. The company was owned by figures close to the Smer-SD party and its sponsors. The murdered journalist Ján Kuciak, among others, described the structure. Yet the courts have still not been able to unravel the tangle of relationships. On the contrary, new suspicions are being added and a group of companies also linked to Tatravagónka’s financiers continues to trade internationally on a large scale.
Štefan Harabin
Štefan Harabin was a prominent figure not only in Mečiarism but also in the first government of Robert Fico. The former judge dominated the Slovak judiciary for a long time and extended his eccentric influence even years later as a presidential candidate and representative of the ultra-nationalist scene.
Štefan Harabin was chairman of the Supreme Court and the Judicial Council under Vladimír Mečiar’s government, a position in which he became famous for bullying judges who were uncomfortable with the regime (see, for example, Zuzana Piussi’s documentary The Sickness of the Third Estate). The practices and campaigns he waged against critical judges were so extensive and cruel that in at least one case it ended in the judge’s suicide. It must be added, however, that this is how the survivors expressed it. Harabin was also a key figure in blocking reforms in the judiciary. In Chapter 2 of the History of Corruption, we also looked at his close relationship with the narco-baron Baki Sadiki.
In the first Fico government, Harabin became Justice Minister. In addition to his notoriety for crude language and bending the law, he managed to paralyse the Special Court, which dealt with large-scale mafia and economic crimes. He managed to oust all his opponents from the judiciary and rejected the career advancement of younger judges.
After serving in the ministry from 2006-2009, he became president of the Supreme Court again by decision of the Judicial Council, which he headed himself, to which dozens of leading figures of the Slovak judiciary protested. Nevertheless, he remained in office until 2014. Since then, he has acted as an extremist politician and has stood with his party, Vlast, as an independent candidate in numerous elections.
