A closed session of the parliamentary Home Affairs and National Security Committee was held on Thursday, called by Committee chair Ranko Ostojic over a series of allegations of information leaks in police investigations and abuses of the legal system.
The main topic of the meeting was the scandal surrounding Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) deputy leader, Milijan Brkic.
Nacional weekly published an article on Tuesday, saying it had documents revealing that in 2011, Brkic – then the national deputy police director – had passed on confidential information about police investigations into an elite prostitution ring, and notified people involved that they were under police surveillance.
Nacional released some police reports which note that Brkic had personally leaked information about police probes. The weekly said that even though an internal investigation had detected the leak, the then leader of HDZ and interior minister, Tomislav Karamarko, had protected Brkic and buried the report.
After today’s session, Chief State Prosecutor Drazen Jelenic said the municipal State Prosecution Office was not in possession of the file from 2011 about the investigations into the prostitution ring, but added there had been no cover-ups in the investigation.
Brkic, also a member of the Committee, did not attend the session.
Jelenic told the press that witnesses had been questioned in that case. “These are the people who had previously spoken to the police informally, but refused to repeat their claims during the official investigation,” Jelenic said, adding that the witnesses had denied their original claims to the police.
He announced his office would try to “recreate” the missing case file to establish whether the investigation had stopped at that point, and whether anything was done unlawfully.
The head of the parliamentary committee, Ranko Ostojic of the centre-left opposition Social Democratic Party (SDP), said he would not accept the claim that there had been no cover-ups until he received in writing everything the committee decided today.
Speaking about the missing case file to N1, Ostojic said he could not speculate on whether someone had a hand in the case file going missing.
“It’s really bad that something like that should disappear… The file can be reconstructed. All the papers which could have been part of the file exist,” he said.
Brkic was also mentioned in the recent Text Message Affair which has led to the arrest of his close friend Blaz Curic, currently employed as the official driver of the agriculture minister Tomislav Tolusic. Curic was arrested on the suspision of warning one Franjo Varga – a former police IT specialist – before Varga’s own arrest earlier this month.
Varga in turn is suspected of having created forged text message correspondence for a number of clients, including convicted football boss Zdravko Mamic, former owner of food and retail group Agrokor, Ivica Todoric, who both used them as arguments that court trials against them were framed.
According to media speculations, in his deposition Varga also said he had created fake correspondence for Brkic, which he presumably used in intra-party conflicts to discredit members of opposing party factions.
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