A panel of judges examining grounds for an indictment by the anti-corruption agency USKOK in a case in which former Deputy Prime Minister Damir Polancec and four former executives of the Podravka food company and their business partners are charged with defrauding Podravka of at least HRK 400 million (approx. EUR 54 million), on Monday refused the request by the defence teams that evidence which they described as unlawful be removed from the case file.
The defence, among other things, requested that the financial expert evaluation on which the indictment is based be thrown out. Defence lawyers also hold that USKOK has breached the defendants' rights and that USKOK should not have been involved in investigating the alleged irregularities in Podravka before the investigation implicated Polancec.
An attorney for the second defendant Darko Marinac, Veljko Miljevic, believes that a specialised institution or a team of experts rather than a single expert should be engaged in preparing a financial expert evaluation.
The presiding judge in the case, Ivan Turudic, however, accepted the opinion of the prosecution that provisions of the Criminal Procedure Act were not breached, Miljevic said today.
The file in this case, dubbed "Spice", consists of over 40,000 pages.
Apart from Polancec and Marinac, who used to be a Podravka executive, the other accused in the case are former Podravka executives Zdravko Sestak, Josip Pavlovic and Sasa Romac; the owner and manager of the SMS company from Split, Srdjan Mladinic; a co-owner of the Fima Grupa company from Varazdin, Milan Horvat; and attorney Zoran Markovic.
After today's second hearing, the judges are expected either to confirm the indictment, or turn it down or return it to the prosecution to complete it.
The defence said that if the indictment was confirmed, they would call to the witness stand state officials who were in office at the time relevant to the indictment, including former prime minister Ivo Sanader.
