By: Spletni časopis
Tamara Vonta from the National Assembly has so far paid €70,016 to the former director of the company Providentia, whose owners also included Vesna Vuković and Primož Cirman, for consulting services in leading a special parliamentary investigative commission of the governing parties, whose purpose is to discredit the opposition ahead of the elections, especially NSi’s Jernej Vrtovec and SDS’s Janez Janša.
The media are reporting, now that the elections have already been called, how Vonta, formerly a POP TV journalist and later employed at GEN‑I, allegedly discovered that Janez Janša’s son received €130,000 over two years from private companies for IT work. These private, mostly media‑related companies were receiving money from the state‑owned Telekom, which, according to these media reports and Vonta’s unofficial findings, could constitute abuses of office worthy of a parliamentary inquiry. Telekom is a major advertiser and pays retransmission fees to most of the country’s largest media outlets. Meanwhile, the Erar application shows the €70,016 payment to Modic, who is a journalist at the portal Necenzurirano, known for spreading propaganda in favour of Svoboda and routinely attacking SDS and NSi, as follows:
Unlike Janša’s son, Modic was paid directly by the state‑owned Telekom in the past. As director of Providentia, Modic was the signatory of a contract under which Telekom paid his company almost the same annual amount between 2016 and 2020 as the sum now being attributed to Janša’s son, except that Janša’s son received that amount from private companies over twice as long a period. In Modic’s case, the payments came from Telekom’s media division. Cirman, Vuković and Modic, the beneficiaries of this money, stopped working for Telekom’s Siol.net through Providentia only a few months before I took over the editorial leadership there in March 2020.
Already in 2022, as shown by the CPC’s Erar portal, Providentia became a significant tax debtor, somewhat unusual given that their annual reports show revenues well above one hundred thousand euros, while operating like Nika Kovač’s 8 March Institute: with no employees and no labour costs. The tax debt on Erar appears as follows:
In addition, the special company SEEM M. & C, founded by Vesna Vuković and later liquidated by Primož Cirman, received more than one hundred thousand euros from the state‑owned GEN‑I under Robert Golob. The contract was signed on 22 July 2019, followed by several annexes. Vuković’s company was also financed by the current finance minister, Klemen Boštjančič, who transferred €34,000 through his consulting firm Brio; Gorenje paid €60,000; and Adventure Investments added another €73,000. To this day, we have heard no explanation from the state‑owned GEN‑I as to why this money was paid.
When Robert Golob took over the leadership of Jure Leben’s party Zdej (formerly SMC), journalist Vesna Vuković became the PR officer of the Freedom Movement, into which Golob rebranded the party, and later even became its secretary‑general, that is, the party’s executive director. Meanwhile, Modic, who still works for the portal Necenzurirano, now operating within the media network of Martin Odlazek’s family, is being paid by Vonta from the National Assembly for consulting. In other words, directly with public money. Yet Vonta is not investigating the financing of Providentia or SEEM M. & C, both funded by state‑owned companies, including the very state company once led by the current prime minister and leader of Vonta’s party, Robert Golob. This further demonstrates that the purpose of her inquiry is solely to discredit the opposition. If she were to investigate everything, she would have to recuse herself, as she is personally involved as a Freedom Movement politician: the investigation would concern the actions of her party leader and her own conduct in paying Modic, a journalist previously financed by state‑owned Telekom and currently working for a media outlet engaged in rather obvious pro‑government propaganda.
Vonta’s conduct is even more noteworthy because the Erar application shows that her family, through the ophthalmology practice Meh, has been a major beneficiary during Robert Golob’s government. The main state payer to this company is the national health insurance fund, and for an activity that is both concession‑based and self‑pay, precisely the kind of “dual practice” that the governing parties aggressively condemn as unacceptable and harmful to public healthcare when it involves doctors in other fields.
And we are not talking about a few hundred thousand euros. We are talking about more than four million euros over ten years from the national health insurance fund. The amounts have also increased significantly in recent years:
