Slovenia’s major COVID-era scandal sees charges dismissed

One of the country's biggest COVID-era scandals, a case involving the purchase of ventilators during the early stages of the pandemic, has ended in the dismissal of a criminal complaint against the then economy minister.

The abuse of office charges have been thrown out due to lack of evidence, but several years ago, the anti-graft watchdog did find integrity breaches in the case, CE Report quotes The Slovenia Times.

The matter concerns the ventilators that the government purchased from Geneplanet in spring 2020. It all started with prominent whistleblower Ivan Gale's allegations of favouritism as part of his wide-ranging accusations of government representatives meddling in the procurement of medical and personal protective equipment, and continued with media reports of a huge difference between the purchase and selling prices for the ventilators.

Two years after high-profile house searchers in summer 2020, the National Bureau of Investigation filed a criminal complaint against Zdravko Počivalšek, the outgoing economy minister at the time, and two other persons.

The minister was accused of abuse of office, while his aide Andreja Potočnik and Geneplanet CEO Marko Bitenc were accused of aiding in the crime, and all three denied the accusations. Parts of the criminal complaint were revealed in the media at the time, with the investigators appearing confident to have found proof of deals for the payment of kickbacks and of notification of suspects about upcoming house searches.

But now two years after a court-led investigation was launched, the case has been dropped as the prosecutors found no evidence of a criminal act being committed. The Ljubljana District Court's decision to close the investigation became final on 24 September, TV Slovenija reported on 6 October.

Happy the case was dismissed, Počivalšek told the public broadcaster that he had trusted and respected the rule of law throughout. The prosecutors' decision is further proof that he did not act against the law in searching for and procuring protective equipment and ventilators, he said.

In a post on X, he wrote that the prosecution and the court found that he and his team did not favour any bidder and did not act against the law.

Geneplanet said that the ventilators it provided were adequate and used in healthcare institutions, and that the Slovenian Agency for Medicinal Products and Medical Devices found no irregularities during its inspection.

It stressed that the court's decision rested solely on a substantive assessment of the facts and is "not based on statute-of-limitations grounds, exclusion of evidence, or any other procedural reasons".

Three years ago the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption did find that Počivalšek had breached integrity and that minimum public procurement standards had not been met in the procurement deal.

The Economy Ministry's €8.8 million contract with Geneplanet, which was later renamed MD-DX, initially involved 220 ventilators, but the company later supplied only 90. The deal went ahead despite doctors' concerns that the devices, found to be of lower or medium performance class, were not suitable for treating Covid patients.

Responding to the news of the dismissal of charges, Geneplanet said that the ventilators had been adequate and used in healthcare institutions, and that the Slovenian Agency for Medicinal Products and Medical Devices had found no irregularities during its inspection.

Photo courtesy of the Celje general hospital