Print version Email to a friend

Slovaks protest graft ahead of March polls

Fri, 3 Feb 2012 20:36 GMT

Source: reuters // Reuters

BRATISLAVA, Feb 3 (Reuters) - Thousands of angry Slovaks marched through the capital Bratislava and five major towns on Friday in protest at a major corruption scandal which has rattled the outgoing centre-right cabinet and boosted populist parties ahead of March elections.

Crowds chanted "national treason" and other slogans, and hurled eggs and bananas at government buildings as they left Bratislava's Square of Slovakia's National Uprising, a focal point of rallies during the 1989 Velvet Revolution that ended communism here.

In December, local media published an intelligence report containing transcripts of meetings involving senior state officials and a private equity group who were the subject of a corruption investigation.

The Interior Ministry last month confirmed that the Slovak Intelligence Service (SIS) had carried out a surveillance operation, which it defended as legitimate and lawful.

But the ministry declined to confirm the authenticity of intelligence report - codenamed "Gorilla" - that was leaked to the media and which has been creating headlines in the former Communist bloc state for weeks.

The leaked graft transcripts detail meetings in a Bratislava flat going back to 2005 and 2006 involved a number of leading politicians, senior officials and executives from the private equity group Penta.

In a statement, a spokesman for the firm, Martin Danko, denied Penta had had "the ties that are alleged with politicians, nor has it received preferential treatment during negotiations or any transactions."

Interior Minister Daniel Lipsic has appointed a special investigation unit to look into the case, which also involves alleged bribes of parliamentary deputies and state officials.

But officials have not confirmed the names of those under investigation.

The graft scandal has dented the popularity of the centre-right parties that were in government at the time of the scandal and boosted populist parties, which polls show stand to enter parliament for the first time on a wave of public revulsion at the scale of corruption afflicting Slovakia.

The country of 5.4 million has struggled to root out corruption and suffers from weak law enforcement, complain businesses, which say graft is a major hurdle for further improvement of the corporate environment. (Reporting by Martin Santa; Editing by Jon Boyle)