Covering up interrogations and giving instructions on what you'd rather not be written. Six details of the Čurilla et al. accusation

The penitent denied the authenticity of his statements – they were just his notes. The police officer admitted that his superiors instructed him not to write everything down. However, former NAKA investigators are also prosecuted for the antedating of the resolution or the allegedly unlawful deployment of the Lynx Commando unit.

Slovenská verzia

The grounds for the prosecution of three former investigators of the National Criminal Agency (NAKA) and the prosecutor of the former special prosecutor's office appear to be the most concrete description thus far of suspicions of manipulation of investigations of major anti-corruption cases in 2021. 

They are based on the wiretapping of NAKA offices, which were intercepted by the Police Inspectorate with the approval of the court. Witnesses in the case include several police officers and also the so-called penitents from the exposed cases: Michal Suchoba, Bernard Slobodník and Daniel Čech.

The central subject of the charges is "Technical File" No. 80, the existence of which has been known since the beginning of this year. The NAKA investigators test-interviewed mainly cooperating witnesses. 

The purpose of the technical file, according to the Police Inspectorate, was not to clarify any specific criminal activity, but "to establish facts about which selected persons could testify and to selectively use the contents thereof with the intention of bringing criminal prosecutions against persons not yet identified". 

However, the defence attorneys of those accused in the Mýtnik (Toll Collector), Očistec (Purgatory) and Judáš (Judas) cases had no idea that the so-called penitents were testifying about them in a technical file. They were therefore not in a position to consult their testimonies and could not, for example, inquire about any possible contradictions in their statements.

Kevin Dlabaj, an investigator with the Bureau of the Inspection Service, found this to be an abuse of power. He accused Ján Čurilla, Pavol Ďurka and Ľubomír Daňko. 

He accused the prosecutor Michal Šúrek of having "knowledge of the prosecution in violation of the Criminal Procedure Code, but intentionally failed to exercise the prosecutor's supervisory authority to overrule an unlawful or unjustified decision by a police officer".

J. Čurilla and P. Ďurka are still members of the Police Force, however they were suspended for previous charges. Ľ. Daňko has left the police and is currently working at the "Zastavme korupciu" (Stop Corruption) Foundation. 

In 2021, prosecutor M. Šúrek was working at the then Special Prosecutor's Office; after its dissolution, the Prosecutor General assigned him to the newly created Prison Department. Maroš Žilinka temporarily suspended him from the prosecutor's office after charges were raised against him for Technical File No. 80.

All four deny the charges.

The media's approach to reporting on this case varies. SME daily, Denník N daily and Markíza TV claim that former NAKA investigators are being prosecuted for "improper procedural practice" or "improper recording of testimonies". Markíza even claims that the accusation "does not mention witness tampering". 

The indictment in connection with the technical file explicitly mentions "preparing people for interrogation in other criminal proceedings".

"Technical File No. 80 was also maintained to ensure that witnesses in regular proceedings, in the presence of defence attorneys, did not testify about undesirable criminal activities of various persons," explained Inspectorate investigator K. Dlabaj. 

For example, the penitent Michal Suchoba explicitly denied at the Inspectorate that the minutes in the technical file captured his spontaneous statements from the summer of 2021.

On the other hand, Aktuality.sk and Hospodárske noviny daily were more reserved about the accusation.

Not all details of the charges, which has 38 pages, have yet been published.

At an unknown time, unknown perpetrators...

The prosecution in connection with Technical File No. 80 was initiated in March 2021 by Pavol Ďurka on suspicion of the crime of establishing and supporting a criminal group, and for alleged corruption offences, but the description of the allegations themselves is weak.

In the statement initiating the prosecution in connection with File No. 80, P. Ďurka did not even indirectly specify who the suspect was. He included a period of nine years in the prosecution. He specified only that this unspecified criminal group allegedly asserted its influence among prominent public officials, corrupted, obtained information illegally and prioritized its business interests. Who, how, when, where – none of these were even indirectly mentioned by the investigator.

The Police Inspectorate sees this allegation as being too vague and claims that the prosecution was fabricated so that NAKA investigators would have a file to interrogate penitents without the accused and their defence attorneys seeing it.

Inspectorate investigator K. Dlabaj additionally accused P. Ďurka of having invented this whole unspecific act in Technical File No. 80: "Despite the fact that he had no objective or realistic basis to justify the initiation of a criminal prosecution, he initiated a fabricated prosecution for an ambiguously identified and confusingly described act," he said.

According to the inspection, the accused police officers were convicted of malicious intent because of the recordings from wiretaps in their offices. For example, Ján Čurilla, in a telephone conversation with prosecutor Michal Šúrek on 21 May 2021, said that Technical File No. 80 would "somehow then be discontinued or something". 

This means that he knew even then that the investigation would not lead to any charges, but he and his colleagues continued it anyway. The further course of the criminal proceedings in File No. 80 confirms this – on 22 August 2021, the investigator Milan Sabota discontinued them because nothing could be found that could be blamed on a particular person. 

Peter Kubina, the defence attorney of the accused police officers, argues, similarly to the former special prosecutor Daniel Lipšic, that technical files were a common part of investigative tactics in the investigation of all criminal groups – to prevent the accused from prematurely obtaining information that the police were still reviewing. 

P. Kubina claims that, in his opinion, the Police Inspectorate itself had such a file for the prosecution of his clients, Čurilla et al. This is File No. 171, in which wiretaps of the NAKA offices were also involved. No one is accused in inspection File No. 171 either, and the offence is also very unspecific according to P. Kubina.

He is correct in that the order initiating the inspection prosecution in File No. 171 is only slightly more specific than that in Technical File No. 80.

P. Kubina himself criticised inspection File 171 the year before last because such an approach to the investigation was not transparent: "I guarantee that no one in this file will ever be prosecuted because that's where they collect the information they don't want to get out. If somebody gets charged, it would already be available to the accused, the defence, it's already out there. Don't ask me if this is standard," he told Aktuality.sk at that time. 

The argument that technical files have been used in the past, or that similar are kept by the Inspectorate itself, does not confirm that they are in accordance with the law. 

There are also some important details which show that the comparison of Technical File No. 80 with inspection File No. 171 is consistent only in part.

In fact, the Inspectorate worked with File No. 171 by excluding from it the specific allegations against Čurilla et al. A new file was created and the accused could access it. In this new file, it was admitted that some of the material came from File No. 171. This was previously also confirmed by P. Kubina. "From the sketchy information I have from our file, I believe that it (File No. 171, author's note) is probably the first file where they started prosecuting the case, collected evidence and carried out wiretaps," he said.

NAKA handled Technical File No. 80 in a different way. The accused and their defence attorneys were not aware of the existence of such a file. 

This can be illustrated by the testimony of the penitent Michal Suchoba in the Mýtnik case about corruption in the financial administration and allegedly overpriced IT contracts. He also testified about these allegations in Technical File No. 80. However, these statements were never included in the regular the Mýtnik case file but, thanks to them, NAKA knew in detail in advance what M. Suchoba would testify about. It also contained his testimony from 13 May 2021. It was on the following day, 14 May, that he gave his official testimony – for the regular case file in the Mýtnik case. It was his first interrogation after his arrival in Slovakia from the United Arab Emirates; previously he had only testified remotely via teleconference.

The Inspectorate also accused the police officers of such concealment of statements in the indictment: "By doing so, they also secured an advantage over the defence as they knew in advance what  were likely to testify about, which allowed them to tactically ask questions during interrogations in regular proceedings, or to not ask about facts that they did not want to be in the testimony, or that would impeach or otherwise discredit the testifying witness."

If the lawyers of the accused took a similar approach to the witnesses, it is likely that someone would see this as so-called collusive behaviour – i.e. an attempt to influence the criminal proceedings.

The NAKA investigators themselves were aware that Technical File No. 80 was a sensitive one. This follows from a recorded conference call between J. Čurilla and his colleagues after the Police Inspectorate came to seize their investigation files in the summer of 2021 :

"I'm sure it will come back to them; this can't just go unnoticed, they're coming for the ongoing things. Although they were only taking things that are already known, things already under accusation, that other people already have access to. It would be worse if they took stuff, if they'd come in to ask for the eighty or so other files with a lot of information about the suspects. That would be utter nonsense," J. Čurilla said.

Apparently they antedated the resolution and the prosecution covered it up

The Bureau of the Inspection Service accuses J. Čurilla, P. Ďurka, Ľ. Daňko and M. Šúrek for allegedly having participated in antedating the resolution on the initiation of criminal prosecution in Technical File No. 80. 

According to the wiretaps, about two months after opening the file, Ján Čurilla discovered that his colleague P. Ďurka had issued this resolution without any instructions. It is an essential requisite of such a police decision; without it, it is illegal. 

"The opening order does not contain an instruction. There is only a signature clause. How should we... Can't we somehow replace it at your place? It's just a working file that will eventually be discontinued anyway, just put it out there, interrogations are already going on in a big way, so that it doesn't collapse on that later," J. Čurilla said on the telephone to prosecutor Michal Šúrek.

The Inspectorate discovered that this is probably what happened. In fact, in the prosecutor's supervisory file, it also discovered the first unlawful resolution to initiate the prosecution without instructions, but the technical file contained a version with instructions as if it had been there from the beginning of the prosecution.

"M. Šúrek not only did not supervise the prosecutor throughout the entire period when he was obliged to supervise him, but also approved, had knowledge of and consented to the criminal prosecution initiated and conducted illegally in this way, as well as the acts carried out within it," claims the inspecting investigator K. Dlabaj.

Matúš Harkabus, a lawyer and former prosecutor of the Office of the Special Prosecutor, claimed on social media that his former colleague was being prosecuted without grounds. "He is being prosecuted for something that may be no more than maladministration, with no intent to cause harm or benefit anyone, so it is not a criminal offence. It is not a question of abuse of power...," he posted on Facebook.

The investigator tried to guide him...

The wiretapping of the NAKA offices is probably the best indication of what one imagines of test interrogations, although this particular recording is not cited by the Police Inspectorate in the charges – because it may or may not be related to Technical File No. 80.

It is a discussion between investigators Štefan Mašin and Ľubomír Daňko, in which Š. Mašin, with amazement in his voice, recounted an alleged conversation with a colleague about the interrogation of a collaborating accused in the case of the Sátorovci criminal group:

"I can still see how they wanted to interrogate that [...]. As a test interrogation. I say, and what is a test interrogation? Well, I will interrogate him normally without lawyers and if the interrogation is not of any use then I will not repeat it, it is procedurally useless and if it is of any use then we will repeat it in the presence of attorneys. Is that what you do? Yes."

While you can feel the wonder in the voice of Š. Mašin, Ľ. Daňko, when mentioning the test interrogations, responded without hesitation that "it must have been with Betka then". This may be an allusion to Technical File No. 80, as also Investigator Alžbeta (Betka) Farkašová was involved in it.

Thus, the recording suggests that at least some of the NAKA investigators understood the test interrogations to be unofficial witness statements that would be officially repeated depending on whether or not their content would be convenient.

This suspicion is reflected in the charge itself in relation to Technical File No. 80. 

Investigator Jaroslav Vereščák from the Eastern Slovak NAKA branch testified at the Inspectorate that he and a colleague had been called to Bratislava by Ľubomír Daňko to interrogate the penitent Michal Suchoba. They came despite the fact that, according to several witnesses, the investigator of the Mýtnik case, Monika Barčáková, was present at the interrogation, too. 

"In her presence, Mr. Suchoba wanted to talk about some criminal activity of Jiří Žežulka, where she tried to direct him that this was irrelevant, to which I objected that if Mr. Suchoba wanted to cooperate he must talk about all the criminal activity and it did not matter regarding which. I finally interrogated him about this suspicion," testified J. Vereščák. 

Jiří Žežulka was the financial administration president when Eduard Heger (then OĽaNO, later Democrats) and Igor Matovič (OĽaNO) were the Ministers of Finance. Suspicion against him was not investigated at the time.

Police officer J. Vereščák testified that his superiors explicitly asked him "to leave out some parts of the interrogation" – allegedly on the grounds of preventing leaks. "I was definitely told which parts to leave out," he said.

The Police Inspectorate also describes other allegations of selection in the investigation of individual allegations about which the penitent M. Suchoba testified. Minutes of four of his interrogations – held on 13, 18 and 19 May 2021, and on 1 June 2021 – were found in Technical File No. 80. 

The following day, on 2 June 2021, Investigator Ľubomír Daňko opened a new criminal prosecution on suspicion of forming a new criminal group related to alleged machinations in the public procurement of information and communication technologies. The file number of the prosecution was 154. Police Inspectorate investigator Kevin Dlabaj believes that this case also involves a technical File. This criminal proceeding was also eventually suspended inconclusively.

On that very day, 2 June 2021, M. Suchoba was interrogated in File No. 154. However, the transcript of this interrogation is merely a redacted compilation of his interrogations from Technical File No. 80. 

The Police Inspectorate therefore doubts the meaningfulness of such procedure. "The reason for initiating such a prosecution is that certain paragraphs about the criminal activities of certain persons were to be left out deliberately, which I consider to be selective securing of evidence in criminal proceedings," says K. Dlabaj. 

A brief comparison of M. Suchoba's interrogation from Technical File No. 80 with his testimony from Technical File No. 154 shows what the Inspectorate Investigator is referring to:

The new testimony of M. Suchoba is missing the part about the alleged criminal activities of the former financial administration president in the era of the OĽaNO finance ministers. 

Also the part about the alleged VAT fraud of the telecommunications company Swan, whose tax advisor was Renáta Bláhová – later advisor to Finance Minister Eduard Heger (then OĽaNO, now Democrats) is missing; when E. Heger became the Prime Minister in April 2021, his government appointed R. Bláhová as chairwoman of the Health Care Supervisory Authority.

This suspicion of selection is all the more serious because M. Suchoba denies that he was at such an interrogation. "I don't remember making such a statement at all. I am 99 percent confident that no testimony was made on 2 June 2021," he reiterated. The Inspectorate investigator therefore showed him the minutes – he recognised signatures and initials similar to his own, but claims that he "definitely" did not sign the minutes. 

A week earlier, a wiretap in the NAKA offices had captured an unintelligible discussion between J. Čurilla and Ľ. Daňko, of which only fragments can be understood – the two of them are talking in the background, in the foreground some of their colleagues are discussing some computer work, while the radio is on in the room. Yet, in spite of all this, we understand one of them saying that "we will write it quasi on Suchoba", "that they told such to Suchoba", and one of them is asking the other one if he had read his statements. As the recording is unclear, the Inspectorate investigator himself is careful not to draw any conclusions from it, stating only that "this statement is more than disturbing" in the indictment.

The interrogations in Technical File No. 80 are also strange in that the penitents were not told at the beginning of the interrogations what matter they were to comment on, although this follows directly from the Code of Criminal Procedure. They were told to testify on everything.

In the house outside the forest without access control

An investigation by the Bureau of the Inspection Service has definitively confirmed that NAKA interrogated a number of cooperating accused in an unmarked building on the outskirts of the capital in 2021. It is a building at the address Cesta na Klanec 52 below the popular urban forest locality of Železná studnička in the Small Carpathian mountains, in the urban district of Lamač. 

Although the building is owned by the Ministry of the Interior, it is not an official Police Force workplace. According to the Code of Criminal Procedure, "acts shall be carried out by law enforcement authorities, as a matter of principle, in official rooms".

"I can't say who made the decision to have those acts performed in this building. I don't know if this is an official Police Force facility. At least I was under the impression that it was. I don't really remember the first time I was there. I don't remember how many times I've been there. Maybe three or four times. In my opinion, it can be traced," testified Monika Barčáková, the investigator of the Mýtnik case, at the Specialized Criminal Court in February.

J. Vereščák testified at the Inspectorate that it was the prosecutor of the Mýtnik case, Ondrej Repa, and the investigator J. Čurilla, who secured the house in Lamač for the interrogations.

The former special prosecutor's office has since informed the court that the interrogations were carried out there in order to prevent leaks of information and also because there were so many of them at the time that the capacity of the rooms for interrogating witnesses in the NAKA building on Račianska ulica Street in Bratislava was insufficient. 

For the same reasons, however, no one has explained why investigators preferred not to use the official interrogation rooms at any of Bratislava's district police departments.

Anyone who goes for interrogation to NAKA has to go through a security check and their details are entered into an electronic system. It is therefore possible to trace back who visited whom, when and with whom. The house in Lamač has no such access records. 

It is exactly such information that would be important if it existed, as shown by the interim results of the Inspectorate’s investigation. The penitent Michal Suchoba claims to have been to the house in Lamač more than five times, which is the number of minutes from Technical Files No. 80 and 154 found thus far. It is unknown where the other ones are. 

He also testified that prosecutors Ondrej Repa and Vasil Špirko were present during the interrogation of 12 May 2021, but the minutes of that date were not found in the technical files.

The Mýtnik case investigator Monika Barčáková should have been present at other interrogations in Lamač, which M. Suchoba and the police officers who were also present agree on. However, she is not mentioned in the minutes found thus far. 

If all of this had taken place in the NAKA building, it would have been possible to trace by name when and to whom these people had come.

These are certainly not my spontaneous statements

The Police Inspectorate has thus far seized the minutes of five interrogations of the penitent M. Suchoba from Technical Files 80 and 154. They all look like notes, not like his spontaneous testimony. They are structured, the thematic blocks are titled, even website links are copied in some of them. 

The Inspectorate therefore presented these minutes to M. Suchoba, who without hesitation denied that they were his spontaneous testimony statements. He admitted that the text looked like notes he had written down in preparation for the interrogation. But how did they get to the police and into the minutes? He doesn't know. 

"I didn't bring anything on any data carrier," he said. He claims that only he and his defence attorneys had the notes. "I have no idea how it got there," he declared. "I signed my spontaneous statements, but certainly not this one," he said. However, he admitted that the signatures and initials on the minutes look like his.

However, his testimony is contradicted by the testimony of another witness, Police Officer Jaroslav Vereščák, who interrogated M. Suchoba. The latter admitted that the penitent had brought paper or electronic notes and these had been used in the minutes: "As far as I remember, I'm sure, this initiative came from him to somehow make our work easier and save time."

M. Suchoba released the original 2021 data file with both annotations and metadata to the Inspectorate.

"The text is identical to the maximum extent to the text of the spontaneous statement of the witness Michal Suchoba in terms of the order of words, sentences and sentence structures. It is therefore evident that this text was either rewritten or copied and filed as his spontaneous statement," says investigator K. Dlabaj.

It is not quite true that the text of his notes is "identical to the maximum extent" to the minutes. A detailed comparison of the documents shows that someone edited M. Suchoba's notes before using them in the minutes – and again, these changes point to the suspicion of manipulation.

In his notes, M. Suchoba had a chapter on alleged bribes for leaving financial administration officials, so-called severance payments. It was allegedly requested by František Imrecze, the then president of the financial administration and a friend of M. Suchoba, for his colleagues. "The next day he brought me a slip, on which, approximately, the following division was specified," he wrote in his notes. However, the word "approximately" was deleted by someone when copying it into the minutes of the interrogation.

Technical File No. 80 contains minutes according to which M. Suchoba also testified about alleged corruption in the Všeobecná zdravotná poisťovňa (VšZP) health insurance company when arranging payments for laboratories. He also has this section in his notes and says that the commissions are supposedly 20 percent of the agreed excess payments from the insurance company. But, when copying it, someone dramatized it and wrote that "every private provider who has an amendment to increase the volume of his/her services at the end of the year in VšZP has found a way to a lobbyist and paid for it the mentioned 20 percent of the increase" – there is no such sentence in M. Suchoba's notes. 

In the chapter on alleged corruption at the Ministry of Education, someone who was copying notes added that the businessman mentioned by M. Suchoba in connection with influencing the allocation of EU funds for research and development "managed them, which means that he was managing the winning projects". He had nothing like that in his notes. 

A similar suspicion arises from the testimony of the penitent Bernard Slobodník. He admitted to the Police Inspectorate that NAKA officers copied his criminal complaints into the witness interview records. 

"It had already been prepared by Investigator (Alžbeta) Farkašová. I mean, it was prepared and printed, I just signed it. I never read what was in any protocol, I trusted the investigator to write it down the way I said it," testified B. Slobodník. 

NAKA's wiretapping of the offices intercepted a possibly related discussion between investigators. J. Čurilla tells A. Farkašová not to send B. Slobodník's criminal complaint by e-mail and delete what she has already sent, "so that somewhere, somehow, there would appear the "TO" (trestné oznámenie - criminal complaint, author's note) and here would be the same one". 

Unlawful deployment of the Lynx Commando unit  

Čurilla et al. are also being prosecuted for the allegedly unlawfully deployment of the Special Unit against businessman Peter Košč, with the nickname Mr. X, who is known primarily for his contacts in the security and intelligence community. 

P. Košč has been under prosecution for corruption since 2021. However, the exact legal qualification is important – it is an offence of bribery. It is a less serious type of crime. Except that under the Police Force Act, the Lynx Commando can be deployed against terrorists, kidnappers and "dangerous organised criminals and those committing deliberate crimes". The offence of bribery does not fall within this definition.

"So, fuck it, let's put it under the eighty. Under the technical one, there the criminal (stuff) started, and what the fuck... We did it because there is simply no one else who can do it," the Police Inspectorate quotes a wiretap statement by Ján Čurilla in connection with the deployment of the Lynx Commando unit against P. Košč.

And so it happened – through Technical File No. 80, they asked for the deployment of the Special Unit to make it look like they were going to intervene against a "dangerous organised criminal" and not against a person accused of the offence of bribery. 

This has also been assessed by Inspectorate Investigator K. Dlabaj as an abuse of power of NAKA investigators.

This part of the accusation, after all, may have a much broader context, as the years 2019 to 2020 were marked by demonstrations of police force and spectacular interventions. 

Two of them are already being examined by the European Court of Human Rights – the raid on the house of the brother of businessman Jozef Brhel, Peter, during which his daughter Barbora was injured, and the raid on the headquarters of the investment group Penta. In both cases, it is suspected that the deployment of special units was not necessary.

In addition, the deployment of sixty special unit members at Penta's headquarters is under the suspicion that the investigator did not have permission to deploy them.