He is indicted for the crimes of accepting a bribe and abuse of authority of a public official, as well as the crime of endangering confidential and reserved information. At the beginning of the hearing, the former director of the secret service refused the possibility of entering into a plea agreement. He rejects the indictment, claims that it is unfounded and that the act is fabricated.
“The deed never happened, our client never committed it, as evidenced today. If something happened at all and it’s criminal, it was committed by someone else, and my client knows who,” he responded the defendant’s lawyer Ondrej Urban. He thanked the court for returning the entire indictment back to the preliminary proceedings for the first time. At the same time, he suggested to the prosecutor that he withdraw the indictment and thus avoid embarrassment, because the deed is fabricated. He recalled that his client had been in custody for six months for no reason.
As a public official, Vladimír Pčolinský should have accepted a bribe of 20,000 euros from businessman and bankruptcy lawyer Zoroslav Kollár in 2020who wanted to ensure that the SIS stopped being interested in him. The court approved a plea agreement for him.
The trial was originally supposed to start at the end of May last year, but the defendant filed a complaint against the decision of the ŠTS judge to accept the indictment. Last year’s dates also had to be cancelled. The reason was the ongoing proceedings at the Supreme Court of the Slovak Republic regarding the filed complaint, and the judge could not act that way.
