Skubla: PG Confirms That USP Failed to Look Fairly in Gorilla Case Complaints(2)

Bratislava, April 18 (TASR) - The decision of the Prosecutor-General's Office in the Gorilla case proved that the now-nonexistent Special Prosecutor's Office (USP) has failed to look fairly into the complaints against charges faced by financier Jaroslav H. [name abbreviated due to legal reasons] for a year and half and such an approach is unlawful, TASR was told by Jaroslav H.'s defence attorney Martin Skubla on Thursday. Skubla finds the charges unlawful, too. "It's a gross misuse of a public official's powers if in such a case the client faces charges not only on an unsubstantiated basis but the relevant bodies have been refusing to attend to his complaint for a long time and seek any excuse possible instead," stated Skubla, adding that this "bullying" will be addressed by his client in both a civil and criminal lawsuit. "The USP literally misused a trite and formal complaint concerning the simultaneous holding of the posts of a police officer and village councillor to avoid the need to withdraw charges in this "profile case" of [Daniel] Lipsic's prosecutor's office over the complete absence of evidence and other instances of unlawfulness," said Skubla. Skubla claimed that after a year and half, the Gorilla case has returned to the state that things stood at in late 2022, when the new charges pressed by a prosecutor in March 2024 no longer applies, but the original charges from November 2022 are back in effect. He added that in 17 months the process of applying evidence has not advanced by a single inch forward and not a single witness has been questioned. The first deputy of the Prosecutor-General's Office scrapped February's resolution to stop the criminal prosecution as well as March's resolution to press new charges in the Gorilla case. The Bratislava regional prosecutor's office is supposed to make another decision on complaints submitted against the original Gorilla case charges from 2022, when an investigator of the specialised Gorilla investigative team pressed charges against Jaroslav H. and four other individuals. mf/mcs