By: Vida Kocjan
Marta Kos, a reserve player for the parallel mechanism in the presidential race, Robert Golob’s candidate for the state’s President, also the vice-president of the Gibanje Svoboda party, otherwise a Swiss citizen, experiencing cold showers in this presidential race, one after the other. Public opinion polls show that she has already dropped out of the race for president.
Some believed that she would withdraw from the electoral presidential race but remain a “back-up”. With a purpose.
A sickly ambitious “back-up”
A Swiss resident with permanent residence in Switzerland, where she also pays taxes, according to experts, the sickly ambitious former journalist is not the first choice of the leaders of the parallel mechanism, but rather a backup player. For them, the first choice is Nataša Pirc Musar, but she is being overtaken by the candidate Dr Anže Logar, Minister of Foreign Affairs in the government of Janez Janša. In the second round of the presidential elections, the transitional left would gain a lot with the candidacy of Kos, the votes would go to Pirc Musar. This is also the sole purpose of this apparent struggle on the left for the presidency.
Who is Marta Kos?
Marta Kos is a journalist, she reported for the national RTV Slovenia from Germany for several years before that she worked for Deutsche Welle in Bonn. It can be seen from some sources that shortly after the establishment of the commercial television company POP TV, she tried very hard to become the host of their TV news programme, but she was defeated, how ironic, by Nataša Pirc Musar, and the Kos family was not yet so influential on this television at that time, as they are now, when some refer to this television company as Kos-TV. The responsible editor and director of the news programme is Marta’s sister-in-law and wife of Marta’s brother Tjaša Slokar Kos, and experts detect the strong fingerprints of Drago Kos, a former criminologist, in the news programme.
Drago Kos also appeared as one of the sources in the political-judicial construct Patria, more precisely in the notorious Finnish documentary about Patria just before the 2008 elections.
Drnovšek did not like her
Experts say that Marta Kos’ entry into high politics has failed several times so far. First in LDS, where her great ambitions ended with Janez Drnovšek. In the late 1990s, Kos headed the government’s information office for several years, and experts say that LDS president Drnovšek showed obvious antipathy towards her.
She then moved to the Chamber of Commerce of Slovenia (GZS), publicly exposing herself with an open attack on Janez Janša and the SDS just before the 2008 elections. In the newspaper Dnevnik, she published a full-page advertisement, a political pamphlet or pre-election agitprop, in which she warned of the danger that the SDS party under the leadership of Janez Janša would win the elections again. As a citizen of the Republic of Slovenia, she expressed “her shame and sadness at the current political situation in the country”. Where the country of Slovenia went after 2008 and what Kos brought us with this agitprop, when it contributed to the narrow victory of the Pahor trio, we experienced first-hand in the following years. Kos paid 8,440 euros for a full-page ad to tycoon Bojan Petan, who owns Dnevnik.
At the same time, she was said to have offered her services to the Social Democrats (SD), who narrowly won the 2008 elections. The Patria construct experienced its epilogue only this year at the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Slovenia: after almost 14 years, Janez Janša was acquitted of all the otherwise imaginary nonsense and accusations.
Acknowledgment of Alenka Bratušek
After the 2008 elections, the left trio of SD, LDS and Zares formed a government coalition with the help of the DeSUS party, but they did not repay Marta Kos for her support. In 2013, Alenka Bratušek took care of the award, then in the role of Prime Minister. Kos, who at that time was still married to Aaron Marko, the founder of the Slovenian branch of Microsoft, was sent as ambassadors to Berlin within the quota of so-called political ambassadors. Her most visible contribution at the time was only her cooperation with the LGBT community.
Control of the embassy in Switzerland
She was the ambassador in Germany until 2017, after which Miro Cerar, the Prime Minister at the time, gave her the ambassadorship in Switzerland. All of a sudden, she was to become a career ambassador. However, there were messages from the embassy about her authoritative attitude towards her subordinates, which led to several conflict situations. She resigned as ambassador to Switzerland. A four-week extraordinary inspection of the embassy was also carried out between May and June 2020. The reasons for the extraordinary control, led by the diplomatic supervisor Andrej Grasselli and his colleagues, were the employees’ complaints about the inappropriate management of the embassy by Kos. These accusations have been going on since her ambassadorial post in Germany – surveillance was initiated even while she was in charge of the embassy in Berlin. There is also a well-known incident when Kos participated in the SD party conference with Tanja Fajon and Božo Repe during working hours, despite warnings, during her ambassadorship.
Marta Kos divorced Aaron Marko in Switzerland. She began appearing with a new partner, long-time Swiss diplomat Henri Gétaz. The latter is the Secretary General of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), based in Geneva.
According to experts, Kos tried her political luck in several parties. For example, she arranged an invitation for Marjan Šarec as Prime Minister to the World Economic Forum in Davos. And she confirmed her connections with the SD party on various party forums. The public even speculated for a while that she was supposed to take over the leadership of the SD, then the party preferred Marta Kos’s journalist colleague, that is Tanja Fajon.
Property of Marta Kos
Kos revealed her assets in the amount of 1.35 million euros to the portal Siol.net. She has 84,000 euros and 161,000 Swiss francs in bank savings, as well as 460,224 euros in securities and capital investments. She has half a million euros in her pension fund, as she explained, from the sale of two properties, namely half of a house in Ljubljana after divorce proceedings and an apartment in Ravne na Koroškem after the death of her parents. She also owns an apartment in Ljubljana, which the Geodetic Administration of the Republic of Slovenia valued at 147,691 euros. She is the owner of an Audi A6 avant car.
At the same time, she is the owner and independent entrepreneur of Kos Consulting & Coaching in Geneva. As she also announced, she has no precious metals, vessels, cryptocurrencies, or valuable works of art.
The report on assets, which Kos also published on her website, raises many questions. She has not published any data on the Swiss company’s operations and sources of income, nor an income tax return showing her total income. You can read more about the fact that she pays taxes in Switzerland, and that she has a registered permanent residence there, in a special box.
Registered associate of SDV
Marta Kos had a file with the number 0014000-05448 in the SDV Central Registry. The file numbers from 14,000 to 14,999 also mean the registration numbers of known sources in the union of employees, members of the reserve composition and registered employees of the SDV. Kos assessed the lists as “false and unreliable”, however, the fact that both the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia and the court in the judgment of Franci Perčič confirmed the microfilms from Udba.net and the codebook, which talks about Udba employees and reservists, as “authentic”.
We are not surprised by the position of Kos, who opposes the condemnation of all three totalitarianisms.
She will move to Slovenia, but until then she will come to show off and then immediately fly to Switzerland
In a recent interview with Siol.net, presidential candidate Marta Kos also answered a question about her life in Switzerland.
Siol.net: Given that you live and work in Switzerland, where do you have your registered permanent residence, where do you pay your taxes, and what will you do if you are elected?
Kos: When I resigned as ambassador, I had a special diplomatic status to live in Switzerland. After that, I lived with my partner, now my husband. You cannot live in Switzerland for longer than three months if you do not get a residence permit. Last year I registered my permanent residence for the first time in Switzerland, I still have a temporary one in Ljubljana. If I am elected, I will of course immediately move to Slovenia and my permanent residence will be at home.
The provisions are such that you pay taxes where your primary interest is. This is not automatism. When I got permanent residence in Switzerland, I had to apply to the Slovenian Financial Administration for an extract from my Slovenian tax residency, and one of the most important criteria for this is where is the focus of your private and economic life. Then there are some other limitations. I have only paid taxes in Switzerland once so far.
The mental twist of Marta Kos
On November 28th, 2021, she stated in an interview for Dnevnik that she does not want to enter politics, or she is not interested in this, especially since she has a new partner in Switzerland after her breakup with her notorious husband Aaron Marko. Well, soon there was a twist.