Imbeciles on trial

Here is the first prize question: can you, off the top of your head, remember anyone, even one single, but one and only, scumbag from the gigantic Croatian transitional robbery, anyone - from prime ministers, ministers, leaders and chiefs to those who held their ladders or waiting for them with the engine idling in a car across the road - who was properly, legally and finally convicted before the Croatian municipal, county, supreme and constitutional courts, arrested and taken to prison, where he served or is serving several years of confirmed and irrevocable imprisonment?

So do you know a single culprit of all those sensational and turbo-exclusive gates, cases, affairs, scandals, embezzlements, buyouts, takeovers, takeovers, transfers, partnerships, privatizations, conversions, state secrets, abuse of power, sister companies, fictitious contracts, secret accounts and fifth friend, at least one friend of the famous Croatian transition, who ended up screwing up and serving time, so that today he walks down the street and avoids journalists?

Let me tell you right away: both of whom you remembered with great effort and hours of Googling - I know for myself - are still not legally and irrevocably convicted, still in court waiting for some kind of decision on appeal, postponement, jurisdiction, exemption or whatever. So can you think of a single one that still doesn't have at least some complaint on the petition for appeal, or some pending submission to the Supreme Court, in some drawer of the second-instance court?

Do you know, in short, a single person who, in the end, twenty-five years later, you can call a thief and a criminal in the newspaper, without receiving a registered lawsuit from a nearby municipal court by a law firm with three surnames?

A few days ago, for example, we were elected to be informed that Jurica Prskalo, the former president of the Croatian Highways Administration - who was fired when seven years ago, together with Ivo Sanader, Božidar Kalmet and Mladen Barišić, was accused of extracting fifty-eight million kuna in that the famous affair of painting the Mala Kapela and Sveti Rok tunnels - by the decision of the County Court in Zagreb almost two months ago, he was returned to work at HAC. After which they will receive, of course, all back wages and interest.

The famous 'Nesklad affair', in which the masters paid for the painting of the Mala Kapela and Sveti Rok tunnels as the painting of the sunset in the sky above Zadar's Riva, and then divided the money - and which became paradigmatic for budget crime, a general site of Croatian ruin - not only did it not , well, not even close to the judicial epilogue, but the masters are slowly returning to work, as if nothing at all had ever happened. Finally, just a few days earlier, Ivo Sanader himself, the Grand Master of all rascals and the face of the Croatian aferluk, was practically acquitted of charges in the famous MOL affair, by the judgment of the arbitration court in Geneva, and after last year's ruling by the Constitutional Court on the annulment of the illegal verdict for bribery ', and now it's already certain that it's only a matter of time, tactics and timing when - suddenly it doesn't sound like exaggeration and bullshit anymore, right? - triumphantly, like in cowboy movies, return to the HDZ assembly.

Every now and then, at regular intervals, we find ourselves so chosen to be informed that some fallen hero of the Croatian transition, whom we have forgotten in the meantime - convinced that due to organized crime and joining a criminal enterprise, he has long since served his prison sentence, so with a new identity he lives on a remote banana farm in Guatemala - acquitted of all charges by the decision of a Supreme, Constitutional, or as they are called, Croatian courts for annulment of judgments.

Then we watch him on television waving some kind of paper and repeating how 'justice won', that beaming face is terribly familiar to us from somewhere, until a woman passing by says: - Look at Nadan Vidošević, how old he is!

Well, often 'release' is formally called 'renewal of proceedings', i.e. 'retrial', but we all know that the legal institution of returning the case to the court of first instance in the Croatian judiciary means repeating the procedure until the case a) expires, i.e. the accused b) ) does not become valid and finally free, or c) dies free. Unless someone really thinks that Nadan Vidošević - or, I am speaking from memory, Božidar Kalmeta - will ever, even in one of his nine lives, be legally convicted and imprisoned?

Legally convicted and imprisoned, um, organized criminal simply does not exist in the Republic of Croatia.

Not provided.

The only convicted minister that comes to mind, Petar Čobanković, did not see prison in the end, but spent a couple of months peeling potatoes in the Osijek soup kitchen; even the icon of privatization robbery, the legendary Miroslav Kutle - the man who single-handedly razed the whole of Split to the ground with his bare hands and to whom the Alexandrian library of newspaper texts and court indictments were written - today, far from any of your long-dead interests, he is screwing around BiH and waiting in which month do judgments expire.

Well, fuck you, we're talking about a country where one of the more obvious, just exemplary cases of crime - nothing special, a bribe for a favor to Hypo bank and the conversion of some land on the island of Pag - was finally solved so that one of the accused, cornered after revelations about false representation in Klagenfurt, the comfortable Hadeze-Esdepe two-thirds majority in the Parliament appointed - a judge of the Constitutional Court! The same supreme court, the father and mother of all Croatian courts, which serves only so that the other courts would not serve anything.

Back in 2004, for example, the state audit investigated a thousand and a half suspicious privatizations from the licentious 90s. Today's second prize question is: how many finally, twelve years later, received a judicial epilogue, how many masters served time in prison, how many mythical privatizations and conversions from the nineties were annulled?

How about a little help? Of course it can: none.

After all, after twenty-five years of a systematic joint criminal enterprise, and then wild, spontaneous robberies, not a single legally imprisoned thief, not a single legally annulled conversion. As it is not prudent to declare the Croatian judiciary complicit in that spectacular robbery - because, unlike legally convicted joint criminal enterprises, a legally convicted journalist is foreseen - it is prudent to assume that no robberies, therefore no organized crime and joint criminal enterprises, in the Republic of Croatia never really was. And if there was no transitional and privatization robbery, then how did we fail so magnificently? The only possible interpretation - not rhetorical or metaphorical, but, as we see, judicially valid - is that the Croats are imbeciles, incapable of leading even a vulcanization operation, let alone their own state.

And that the only money they will see from the entire quarter-century of crime is if they sue the journalist for calling them imbeciles.

(portalnovosti.com)