Overview of the week's top stories
since 14 May 2002

On Wednesday, former State Secretary Boris Šuštar’s appeal went before the Ljubljana High Court. Šuštar, his wife and two others were arrested in November 2000 and sentenced in June 2001 in Slovenia’s first major corruption scandal.

Last June, a regional court convicted Šuštar of two counts of accepting a bribe. He was sentenced to three years in prison and fined SIT 7 million (USD 30,000). The implementation of the sentence was put on hold pending appeal.

The others implicated in the affair were businessman Stanislav Droljec, who received a one-year prison sentence and a fine; Boštjan Šoba, former member of the oversight council of the Slovene Development Agency, who received two years’ probation; and Šuštar’s wife Rozana, who was acquitted.

The High Court spent Wednesday reviewing old testimonies, indictments and telephone-conversation transcripts. The case took a strange twist on Thursday, with both the defense and prosecuting attorneys calling for the Regional Court’s verdict to be canceled.

The defense argued many of the witnesses were unreliable, and presented new evidence of Šuštar’s innocence, such as an independent polygraph test in an effort to have the case thrown out. The prosecuting attorney agreed that there were many errors made in the earlier legal proceedings, but he demanded a new trial. The High Court’s verdict on the appeals will be known within one month.

At a seminar in Maribor this week, director of the government Office for the Prevention of Corruption Boštjan Penko said that there is a major discrepancy between statistical data and public opinion about corruption. While public opinion holds that corruption is wide-spread, Penko said that only 30 to 60 complaints are received by the authorities each year. Very few of those end in convictions.

According to the governmental Office of Statistics, there were 15 convictions in 1999 compared to 56 allegations of corruption reported to authorities. In 2000, 42 allegations resulted in only nine convictions.

However, in a poll taken by Delo-Stik in March 2001, nearly half of the 711 respondents felt that corruption was too widespread. Almost 60 percent said that they believed the country is too tolerant of bribes. But while 64 percent said they had been in positions where they thought a bribe would improve their situation, and 29 percent have felt a bribe was expected, only 14 per cent have actually tried more than once to pay a bribe.

The opposition parties SDS and NSi, allied as Koalicija Slovenija, called for early elections this week, responding to the government’s announcement that the 2002 budget must be recosted, due to lower economic growth and a slightly higher deficit than expected.

At a press conference, Janša suggested that the government "does not control public finances" and called for parliamentary elections in October or November, to coincide with the local and presidential elections, as well as elections to the National Council.

None of the other parliamentary parties support the demand, with the exception of the Nationalists. The LDS, which leads the government, suggested that Koalicija Slovenija’s statements derive from an insufficient understanding of public finance.

Representatives of the ZLSD were more vocal. Chief Secretary Dušan Kumer told Dnevnik that Koalicija Slovenija is "trying to confuse political rivals as well as voters."

The Maribor police have filed criminal charges against four professors affiliated with the International Business School (IBS) at the University of Maribor suspected of defrauding more than a dozen students from China. The four were supposed to have organized studies for the students at the University from March 2000 to the end of 2001.

Not only were the classes not what the students were led to expect, but also the IBS was never formally registered, and the educational transcripts of none of the students were evaluated to allow them to study in Slovenia. Once the Ministry of Education began reviewing the case, only four of the students were found to be qualified for study at the University of Maribor.

Most of the students have already returned home. Unfortunately, only one of the students paid the University directly; the others paid through agencies in China and that money is all but impossible to recover.

A civil suit against the professors is still pending. Five of the students filed a suit in January against the University of Maribor in an attempt to recoup their losses and return to China. The students want reimbursement for their tuition along with damages to cover the living and travel expenses they incurred. The damages amount to USD 35,000.

Maribor appointed the country’s first Ombudsman for Patients' Rights in March, but establishing a similar post in Ljubljana has run into complications, according to Dnevnik.

In Maribor, the ombudsman is assisted by a commission with three members, and is mandated to call attention to healthcare issues and to offer free legal advice to anyone whose rights may have been violated. The ombudsman’s responsibilities would be virtually the same in Ljubljana.

The primary argument against creating the post of ombudsman in Ljubljana is that it is inefficient to address national problems piecemeal on the local level

A representative of Ljubljana’s Division for Heath and Social Safety told Dnevnik that "the proper authority to regulate the institute of the Ombudsman for Patients’ Rights is the Ministry of Heath, and not the city."

"We have done much towards creating the institution of the Ombudsman for Patients’ Rights for all of Slovenia, the project was prepared already in the beginning of 2000, but unfortunately was not accepted. A partial solution will not be able to fulfill people’s expectations," the president of the Consumers’ Union Brenda Kutin told Dnevnik. The functions proposed for Ljubljana’s ombudsman are currently being handled by the Union.

The Ljubljana city council will review a draft law to establish the post of Ombudsman for Patients’ Rights in the city in the near future. The proposal has been forwarded by the local branch of the NSi.

• An exhibit documenting the Cankarjev Days celebrations in Sarajevo opened this week in the Bosnian capital’s Gallery Mak. The local Slovene organization, the Cankar Society, has organized Cankarjev Days since 1993. The exhibit features documents, photos, posters and news articles related to the annual event. This year’s Cankarjev Days began on 10 May with an international theatre production called "Letters from the Front." Upcoming events include a seminar called "Freedom and Responsibility of the Media" on 18 May and the Jan Došner memorial tennis tournament on 8 and 9 June.

• To mark the occasion of the anniversary of the release of their record-breaking album Nord, Siddharta will release a remix album called Silikon Delta before the end of the month. Nord, Siddharta’s second album, was released on 9 May 2001. It has been on the Slo Top 30 ever since, and became the quickest and best-selling album in that chart’s history, with more than 21,000 units sold so far.

• Ljubljana’s Kolosej is celebrated its one-year anniversary with the premier of Star Wars – Episode II: Attack of the Clones on 17 May. Other events ran through Sunday. Kolosej opened on 16 May 2001, and since then, more than 1.6 million tickets have been sold and more than 141 films have premiered.

• Maja Weiss’s Varuh Meje won the special jury prize for a first feature film at the 4^th Miami Festival of Gay and Lesbian Film this week. This was also the film’s American premier. Varuh Meje is the first Slovene film to present lesbian themes. The Miami festival included more than 60 feature-length, short and documentary films from the US, Australia, the UK, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Spain, Argentina and South Africa.

• On Thursday, the 51^st European Judo Championships began at Tabor Hall in Maribor. The Slovene contingent was 24 strong, but more than 400 athletes – among them 17 Olympic-medal winners – participated from 41 countries. The event ran through Sunday.