By: Nova24tv.si
The extent of the political abuses of the previous government is coming to light. Aleš Hojs highlighted his own case, in which his bank account was closed after he appeared as a witness, allegedly because he was considered a “politically exposed person”.
With the departure of Golob’s government and the arrival of the new right‑wing coalition, abuses of the previous administration are coming to light. Aleš Hojs of the SDS highlighted his own case during the parliamentary debate on the inquiry commission led by Tamara Vonta. Let us recall that Vonta headed the parliamentary inquiry commission tasked with investigating alleged illegal financing of political parties and the alleged unlawful financing of media outlets connected to the SDS with public money during the third Janša government. But as it now appears, the commission primarily served as a government‑driven attack on media outlets that dared to criticise Robert Golob’s administration.
Abuse of the commission to access personal bank accounts
Aleš Hojs used his own experience to expose how the investigation was misused for political purposes. He was summoned before the commission not as a suspect or an MP, but merely as a witness. According to him, Vonta even threatened to report him for perjury, although no such report was ever filed. Instead, two months later Hojs received a notice from his bank informing him that his account was being closed: “Something else happened. After two months I suddenly receive a notice from the bank that they are going to close my account. I go to the bank and ask why, since I have regular income, I pay my loans on time, everything is as it should be. I never exceed my limit, I pay practically everything with a credit card, not in cash. Do you know what they told me at the bank? That I am a politically exposed person and that they have had enough of this “circus” with the commissions sending them requests to forward my account information to the National Assembly.” Hojs then asks: “Can you imagine what kind of abuse this is?” and continues: “So Ms. Tamara Vonta was apparently accessing our personal bank accounts through the commission.” He does not know why, but he assumes Vonta may have passed the information to Tomaž Modic, who, according to Hojs, apparently misread it and then wrote all sorts of things in the media about Hojs’s income and assets.
Witnesses treated as defendants
“A complete abuse of this commission,” Hojs concluded, accusing the left of misusing the commission wherever possible. In the future, he says, an intervention law will prevent such problems, as it stipulates that a bank is obliged to open an account for regular income. After his account was closed, he had to go to two other banks. The first also refused to open an account because he was a “politically exposed person”, but he eventually managed to arrange it at the next bank he visited.
Hojs’s statement stirred up social media, where numerous commentators reacted. Among them was independent investigative journalist Bojan Požar, who wrote that everything Hojs said is unfortunately true. According to him, it appears that all witnesses were treated as defendants in the internal communication between the police, the bank, and the financial administration. “It was the same in my case,” Požar recalls. “What’s more, they questioned me – as a “witness” – even after they had reviewed my/our banking and other documentation and could see for themselves that nothing was wrong, that neither my company nor I had any connection to the financing of political parties.” He added that they asked him questions that were not even related to the subject of the investigation. “With this parliamentary inquiry commission (of Tamara Vonta and Svoboda), it was definitely one of the biggest political abuses of state and other institutions, but unfortunately no one will be held criminally accountable for these evident abuses.”
Boris Tomašič also responded to Požar’s comment regarding criminal liability, saying that Vonta will not escape justice so easily. He wrote that he has supplemented the criminal complaint against her and called on Požar and Hojs to join him
In addition to Požar and Tomašič, the matter was also commented on by analyst Sebastjan Jeretič, likewise a target of Vonta’s commission, which, as he says, “acted in violation of the law”: “I was not a suspect, I was not even summoned as a witness, yet they were digging through my bank accounts and harassing my clients. Because they found nothing problematic, they tried to invent something to discredit me.”
