Investigative journalist shot dead in Slovakia had probed a Malta connection

Five months after Maltese reporter and blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed by a car bomb, another investigative journalist has been assassinated in Europe. Jan Kuciak, who was killed along with his girlfriend in Slovakia, had also been investigating

An investigative journalist and his girlfriend were gunned down on Sunday, February 25, in an assassination which was almost certainly linked to his work.

Jan Kuciak, 27, had been investigating a Slovakian businessman who invested in property in Malta.

Kuciak worked for Aktuality, a Slovakian website which was owned by German news organization Axel Springer.

He specialized in tax fraud and money laundering investigations and had accused Slovakia’s ruling Smer-SD party of having links with shady businessmen and the local mafia in Bratislava.

Kuciak and his girlfriend Martina Kusnirova were killed at his home in the village of Velka Maca, 50 miles east of Bratislava.

Axel Springer condemned the “cruel assassination” of the journalist and the Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico offered a one million euro million reward.

Kuciak was reportedly digging into transactions carried out by businessman Marian Kočner and in September he reportedly filed a motion against Kočner, who he accused of threatening him.

“Already, 44 days have passed since I filed the criminal motion against MK for threatening me and still, my case has probably not even been allocated to a specific officer yet,” Kuciak wrote on Facebook at the time.

Last year a luxury apartment complex in Bratislava was at the centre of a political scandal.

“From the information available it seems that the most likely version is a motive connected to the investigative work of the journalist,” said Slovakian police chief Tibor Gaspar.

Sputnik International said that several journalists in Malta, including Ms Caruana Galizia’s son, Matthew, have said Kočner had links with the island.

Kočner’s daughter reportedly married his Maltese lawyer, Christian Ellul. Although they have since divorced Ellul is still a director of one of Kočner’s companies.

In 2012 Malta Today claimed Kočner was linked to the transfer of four million euros from a Maltese bank to accounts in Slovakia.

The payments were said to be to Slovakian politicians and the socalled “Gorilla” scandal led to the parliament building in Bratislava being pelted with bananas.

The leader of Slovakia’s neo-liberal Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) party, Richard Sulik, was also seen at Kočner’s home at the time. Sulik denied any wrongdoing.

After Kuciak’s murder the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe came out with a statement about the freedom of the media.

“We cannot accept journalists to become regular targets for attacks and killings because of their investigation on corruption,” they said.

Even during the turbulent and lawless decade that followed the end of communism in 1989, no reporter was ever killed in Slovakia. Beaten and threatened, yes — on multiple occasions. But never executed with a single bullet to the heart or head, as befell Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée Martina Kušnírova in their home late last week.

Corruption in Slovakia is an age- old cancer. During World War II, the country’s Nazi-puppet government rewarded citizens who informed on Jews. Under communism, secret informants and party members enjoyed similar material and social advantages for betraying their peers. With the arrival of democracy, the well-connected again made out like bandits through privatization: the scandalous transfer of almost all of the nation’s assets to private owners through murky tenders and for a fraction of their real worth.

Ján was too young to have lived through Slovakia’s Klondike era of the 1990s. By the time he became a journalist, the state had few assets left worth stealing. But what did attract criminals were lucrative opportunities in carousel tax fraud — in which the state returns to fraudsters the VAT tax that they “paid” on goods they fictitiously claimed to have exported to another EU nation.

Financial transfers from richer EU nations to poorer countries offered similarly rich pickings. To give an idea of the scope of these payments, between 2007 and 2013 Slovakia was eligible for €11 billion in handouts.