By: Tanja Brkić (Nova24tv)
“I am glad that things will finally become transparent through the court, how Necenzurirano portal does business, how journalists, who claim to be independent but who are actually a part of the operation of one of the main government parties, do business,” TVS director Uroš Urbanija told Nova24TV in response to the lawsuit. His post on Twitter angered the editors of the portal Necenzurirano.si so much that they filed a private criminal lawsuit against him. Today, a preliminary hearing was held at the District Court in Ljubljana, but one of the main actors of the Necenzurirano portal did not attend.
Director of TVS Uroš Urbanija described the operations of the company that manages the Necenzurirano portal as “mafia”, since, judging by all the facts presented, in his opinion, this contains all the elements of the definition of “mafia”. Because the truth hurts, the portal’s editors got so offended that they filed a lawsuit against Urbanija. The director of TVS does not regret his words, because in his opinion the truth will finally come to light, but at the same time he thinks that it is probably an attempt to intimidate with the aim of getting him to withdraw from his position, but Urbanija replies that “their efforts will bear no fruit”.
“They are suing because of my comment on information that was in the public domain, namely that last year the accounts of the company that manages the Necenzurirano portal were blocked by the Financial Office, and they were opening their accounts abroad. At the time, I commented that it was a mafia business system and if this had happened in any other media, this story would have been the story of all the major media,” explained Urbanija at the outset.
We remind you that Požareport, based on its reliable sources, revealed in April 2022 that the Necenzurirano portal or the company Providentia Ltd., which manages the portal, owed FURS, i.e., taxpayers, 290,493.00 euros at that time. Also, all transaction accounts in the country have been blocked for a long time, and FURS has also issued a decision to block all movable assets of this company. With Svoboda’s coming to power, when a change at the top of the financial administration also took place, Providentia’s tax debts also disappeared, after which Požareport discovered that the mentioned company opened accounts abroad.
Vesna Vukovič did not attend the preliminary hearing
“They were bothered by the description that it was a “mafia business”, but considering everything that was hidden, today it is all the more justified,” said Urbanija, adding that he expected to face all three prosecutors at the pre-trial hearing today, “that is, on the one hand, the general secretary of the Gibanje Svoboda party Vesna Vuković, adviser of Gibanje Svoboda in the National Assembly Tomaž Modic and partner of the acting Director of the Government Office for Communication Primož Cirman, but unfortunately Vuković did not attend the hearing. I would expect her to explain what she has been hiding from the public for several months, namely why Prime Minister Robert Golob, in his former role, transferred more than 100 thousand euros through the company and this is still hidden from the public today, while she worked as an independent journalist at the time,” he explained.
Gen-I transferred 103 thousand euros to her company SEE M. & C. over several years, the last transfer of 3,660 euros was transferred to the company’s account last year; she left the ownership of this company herself in March 2019. When Vuković “transferred” to Golob last August, she claimed to the N1 media that she would explain all the circumstances in about two weeks, when she would arrange everything necessary for the “transfer”, but the Slovenian public never received this explanation.
Urbanija does not regret his words
Urbanija continued that it would also be “worth explaining how you can act as an independent journalist, but on the other hand it turns out that you are just an operative of one of the current government parties. These are all elements of mafia business, and I am actually very happy that certain things will be revealed in this trial, which these authors obviously wanted to hide from the Slovenian public.” Urbanija does not regret his words, as it was further revealed that the operating system of the company that manages the Necenzurirano portal is a typical mafia mode of operation, according to the definition of the meaning of the word “mafia”.
The director of TVS believes that the plaintiffs decided on the aforementioned lawsuit after his arrival in his current position, which, in his opinion, is another attempt by the government of the Republic of Slovenia to frighten him through their “deputies” or force him to withdraw in one way or another, but “their efforts will bear no fruit”, asserted Urbanija, adding at the end that he is “happy that things will finally become transparent through the court, how Necenzurirano does business, how journalists, who claim to be independent but who are secretly part of the operatives of one of the main government parties, do business.”