PEZINOK, Slovakia — Marian Kocner, the Slovak businessman accused of ordering the murder of a journalist whose reporting linked him to high-level political corruption and organized crime, arrived in the courtroom wearing a flashy navy blue suit and tie.
No stranger to the news media, he smirked at the reporters filling rows of hard wooden benches.
“I’m innocent,” Mr. Kocner said after the prosecution read the charges.
But while the swagger was still there as hearings began last month in what promises to be a monthslong trial, his hands were cuffed, his family was absent and he faced a possible lifelong prison sentence if convicted of the murder of the journalist, Jan Kuciak, and his fiancée, Martina Kusnirova, both 27, who were shot dead two years ago.
The murders shocked Slovakia and spurred its largest protests since the 1989 Velvet Revolution that paved the way for the country’s eventual independence. The outrage led to the resignation of Prime Minister Robert Fico and other top government officials, and helped a political novice with a reformist vision, Zuzana Caputova, win the presidency last year.
And with national parliamentary elections on Saturday, in which Mr. Fico’s party could find itself out of power for the first time in eight years, the trial of Mr. Kocner and his associates has riveted the country.
Daniel Lipsic, the Kuciak family lawyer, said in an interview that the public had largely grown “frustrated or even apathetic about various corruption cases,” but that “the murder of two young people is a different story.”
“That’s why I think it has the potential to change the society,” he said.
While accusations of widespread political corruption are no surprise in Slovakia, no previous trial has promised to expose it in such detail. And in many ways Mr. Kocner’s story embodies the struggle that many former Soviet bloc countries have faced as they embraced unbridled capitalism almost overnight.
In the often lawless early years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Kocner’s path to success, as court documents outline it, was a familiar one.
Prosecutors say he used a combination of threats, intimidation, bribery and political connections to become a powerful and wealthy businessman in this small country that was a part of Czechoslovakia until its peaceful separation in 1992.
Even as Slovakia moved closer to the West, joining NATO and the European Union, Mr. Kocner thrived in large part thanks to his connections to the longtime governing party, SMER-SD.
Mr. Kocner went to great lengths to secure that relationship, hiring investigators to dig up dirt on politicians, journalists, prosecutors and anyone he deemed a threat, according to evidence presented in court.
But two years ago, according to prosecutors, he took matters a step further, ordering the assassination of Mr. Kuciak, who was shot and killed along with Ms. Kusnirova in their home on Feb. 21, 2018.
According to the prosecution, the original plan called for Mr. Kuciak to be kidnapped and killed and have his body dumped in a place where it would never be found.
But Miroslav Marcek — a former soldier who has admitted to being the hit man in the case and is cooperating with the prosecution — told the court in January that he had rejected that approach as too unreliable.
Mr. Marcek told the court that he had been driven to a soccer field near the couple’s home in the village of Velka Maca. “I walked around the field to the house. I went to the yard — nobody was home, everything was dark — so I waited in the summer kitchen,” he said.
When the couple returned, he testified, “Mr. Kuciak opened the door — I shot him in the chest.”
“But unfortunately I saw another person,” Mr. Marcek added, referring to Ms. Kusnirova. “When he fell back, the door opened wider, she ran into the kitchen, I ran after her and hit her as well.”
At that point in his testimony, Ms. Kusnirova’s mother, who was present in the courtroom, burst into tears.
Mr. Marcek offered an apology, but it appeared to give her little comfort. When it was her turn to comment to the court, she had one question.
“Martina and Janko had planned to have three children,” she said. “I want to ask the defendants: Why did they take the love of our children and grandchildren away from us?”
Turning her gaze on Mr. Kocner, she said, “I know that what we are going through means nothing to you — because with you, the love for power and money always wins.”
Mr. Kocner declined to testify in the case, and although his lawyer challenged some of the evidence, his attempts to have the case dismissed have failed. The defense has not yet made its full argument before the court.
The prosecutors’ case file, which runs to about 25,000 pages, also alleges a sordid nexus between Mr. Kocner and the country’s political elite — the same line of reporting that Mr. Kuciak’s journalism pursued.
A former intelligence officer, Peter Toth, has testified that he worked for Mr. Kocner as manager of a team that was used to uncover the “dirty secrets” of Slovak journalists and other enemies.
He is cooperating with investigators and turned over evidence including documents, two iPhones and a small car packed with diamonds, pearls, furs, suits and blackmail materials.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project obtained the entire file of evidence in January and was the first to make many of its details public.
“Most billionaires don’t enjoy the luxury Marian Kocner and his family did,” Mr. Toth told the court, describing a week he spent with the businessman on his yacht in Croatia in 2017.
“I’m glad I went there,” he said, “because it made me understand what Mr. Kocner has to lose.”
It was around that time that the walls seemed to be closing in on Mr. Kocner, who had long been a subject of public speculation without ever being convicted of any wrongdoing.
Mr. Kocner, who has been the focus of multiple investigations involving financial crimes in the past two years, was convicted on Thursday in a separate case involving the defrauding of a United States-owned television network. He was sentenced to 19 years in prison.
Mr. Kuciak was investigating transactions that he suspected had brought Mr. Kocner millions of euros in fraudulent tax refunds.
Mr. Kuciak’s colleagues from the news website Aktuality.sk testified about a threatening phone call from the businessman in autumn 2017, saying that the reporter was told, “I’ll be looking especially into you, your mother, your father and your siblings.”
“Jan had threatened his impunity and his business and wealth at the same time,” testified his editor, Marek Vagovic. “I have counted around €100 million that Jan Kuciak has uncovered in cases that he wrote about.“
Many in Slovakia say the case is forcing them to confront ugly truths about their country. That includes Mr. Kuciak’s father, Jozef.
“We used to argue with my son sometimes,” he told the court, adding that he had voted for and trusted SMER. “That’s why I hadn’t believed the threats from Mr. Kocner in the beginning. I thought that nothing like that could happen here, since we had functional prosecution, courts and police.”
Too late, he said, he discovered he was wrong.
“For people like Mr. Kocner, mammon is everything — he devoted his whole life to money and he wouldn’t even stop after having two young people killed.”
Miroslava German Sirotnikova reported from Pezinok, and Marc Santora in London.
Source : Nytimes
