Chief State Prosecutor Drazen Jelenic on Friday said that a 2011 file on information leaks during an investigation into a prostitution ring, that has gone missing from the municipal prosecutor's office, is currently being treated as negligence in procedure and that it was necessary to determine whether someone had deliberately displaced the file.
“I want to clear up within this institution whether this was deliberate or a matter of negligence. If it was deliberate, then we have to talk about inquests, investigations and other criminal and legal procedures,” Jelenic told reporters.
Nacional weekly on Tuesday published an article in which they said they were in possession of documents which reveal that in 2011 Milijan Brkic – now Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) deputy leader and 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. Some police reports released by the Nacional said that Brkic had personally leaked information about police probes, and that, even though an internal investigation had detected the probes, the then HDZ leader and Interior Minister Tomislav Karamarko had protected Brkic and buried the report.
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Jelenic said that in addition to internal control by him, the Zagreb municipal prosecutor’s office will continue working on completing the file that has been determined to be missing as well as on clarifying the entire case.
He said that enquiries determined that the Zagreb municipal prosecutor’s office did not report the existence of that case to superiors. Nevertheless, Jelenic said that he cannot claim the file had been destroyed or stolen.
“It is just as likely that it might have been misplaced,” the Chief State Prosecutor’s Office said, adding it could have happened when the Zagreb municipal prosecutor’s office moved into a new building in August last year.
The prosecutor who worked on the information leaks case seven years ago, from which the elite prostitution case emerged, officially interviewed two people who mentioned Brkic while talking to the police. Their statements to the police were to have been used as official evidence, but they later did not repeat their testimonies to a Zagreb County Court investigative judge.
After completing the file with the assistance of Zagreb County Court and the police, which confirmed that they informed the prosecutor’s office about everything on two occasions, in June and July 2011, it will be necessary to determine whether there are grounds for further or new action by the prosecutor’s office relating to the disclosure of confidential information.
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