The number of indictees at the forthcoming trial for attempted bribery of Supreme Court judges so that they would overturn a ruling against Branimir Glavas, a politician convicted of war crimes committed in Osijek in 1991, will be reduced to Osijek businessman Drago Tadic after the remaining indictees, including HDSSB member of parliament Ivan Drmic, reached an agreement with the USKOK national investigating agency on being given two-year suspended prison terms in exchange for their guilty plea.
Drmic, a parliamentarian of the Croatian Democratic Party of Slavonia and Baranja (HDSSB), Sanja Marketic, a former deputy editor-in-chief of the Glas Slavonije daily, and Tadic's wife Bozica Tadic-Cavar have made plea agreements with the Office for the Suppression of Corruption and Organised Crime (USKOK) under the same conditions as stipulated in the plea agreement which Split businessman Srecko Jurisic, their co-defendant, made with the prosecution ten days before the Zagreb County Court upheld the indictment on 13 October 2011, the defence teams for Drmic, Marketic and Tadic-Cavar said on Monday.
On October 3, the court confirmed the two-year suspended prison term with five years' probation agreed with Jurisic, who has to return to the state the EUR 70,000 which USKOK contends he received for the purpose of bribe from Drmic and Marketic.
The plea bargains which Drmic, Marketic and Tadic-Cavar concluded with the USKOK should be confirmed by a Zagreb County Court panel of judges, presided by Judge Zdravko Majerovic, at a preparatory hearing scheduled for Tuesday.
The panel of judges is expected also to set a date for the commencement of the trial, after this decision was postponed at a hearing last November due to Marketic's illness.
Last Thursday the parliamentary Credentials and Privileges Commission (MIP) stripped Drmic of immunity from prosecution and approved the continuation of criminal proceedings against him.
According to USKOK, Tadic linked the other indictees in June and July 2010, when the Supreme Court was deciding on an appeal against the Glavas ruling, in an attempt to find persons who could be bribed to influence the court's judges or bribe the judges to grant the appeal. Marketic and Drmic were supposed to collect EUR 70,000, Tadic Cavar was to coordinate their activities, while Tadic and Jurisic contacted a number of people for information about the case.
After Marketic and Drmic allegedly each collected EUR 35,000, Jurisic took the money and was to give it to a person who would influence the approval of Glavas's appeal, but Jurisic did not deliver the money because Marketic and Drmic abandoned the scheme and informed the others about it.
In order to avoid being charged, Marketic and Drmic pressed charges with the Osijek-Baranja County police against an unknown perpetrator for fraud, lying about giving the money to an unknown perpetrator.
The Zagreb County Court sentenced Glavas to 10 years' imprisonment for war crimes against Serb civilians, and the Supreme Court reduced the sentence to eight years. Before the trial court verdict was handed down, he fled to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he is now serving his prison sentence.
