Governor of the National Bank of Slovakia Peter Kažimír has been found guilty of bribery in a high-profile case and has been fined €200,000, which can be turned into a one-year prison sentence if not paid.

The ruling is not final, and Kažimír‘s lawyers stated they would recommend their client to appeal the verdict. Kažimír, a prominent hawkish member of the European Central Bank's governing council, has repeatedly cast doubt on the court case.

“They already managed to dirt and harm my name. With a clear conscience that I have not committed any illegal deeds, I shall clean it,“ reads Kažimír’s statement, shared by liberal daily SME and other Slovak media.

The verdict also includes seizure of property amounting to €48,000, which is the amount ex-president of the country’s customs service, František Imrecze, confessed to have received from Kažimír in exchange for privileged treatment of companies eligible for tax returns and other favours.   

As bne IntelliNews reported, in April 2023, Kažimír was found guilty of bribery by the country’s Special Criminal Court and fined €100,000. Kažimír has appealed against the then verdict. 

Kažimír was finance minister between 2012-2019, and the offence was allegedly committed in 2017 when the previous cabinet of populist Prime Minister Robert Fico was in power. Charges were pressed in 2021, after the new centre-right government entered office the year before, having won the election on an anti-corruption ticket.

Following the populist Smer government-backed changes to the criminal code implemented after Fico’s return to power in 2023, the statute of limitations for corruption cases such as Kažimír’s was shortened to three years, the liberal daily DennikN wrote last December, while Kažimír’s lawyers wanted the case to be dropped altogether.  

Judge Milan Cisarik stated in the ruling that most of Kažimír‘s defence focused on the statute of limitations, but these cannot be applied, as the deed concerned EU money and value added tax, press agency TASR and other Slovak media reported.

Opposition parties have called on Kažimír to resign in response to the verdict, but the central banker has the backing of the Fico government.

After the verdict, Fico repeated his earlier allegations that investigations of Smer-linked corruption scandals are politically motivated. "Even a student of the law faculty must see fatal nonsense in the ruling," Fico, a lawyer himself, was quoted as saying by TASR and other media, without providing further details.    

Changes to the criminal code were met with country-wide protests and are widely seen as Smer’s effort to suffocate the anti-corruption drive and protect the Smer-linked officials, while liberal media and NGOs also rang alarm bells over the rule of law backsliding under Fico’s left-right cabinet.

Last November, DennikN also published an extensive investigation documenting how Kažimír’s girlfriend Katarína Korecká bought a €1.5mn villa in the South of France in 2014 after obtaining the money from Smer-linked oligarch Jozef Brhel through a series of transactions from 2013-16 involving offshore accounts in Cyprus. The loan was apparently never repaid.

Slovak police confirmed to DennikN it is looking into the information published in the DennikN investigation from November 29.  

Besides Kažimír's involvement in the Imrecze bribery case and the French Riviera villa scandal, Kažimír is also a witness in the large corruption case dubbed “Mýtnik” (“customs officer”), which also allegedly involved Brhel and resulted in €45mn in damages to the state in overpriced IT tenders, according to prosecutors.