STA, 15 March 2021 - As part of its preliminary procedure, the corruption watchdog has established there were no corruption risks or breaches of the integrity law when Interior Minister Aleš Hojs bought a piece of land on the Slovenian coast in July 2020.
The Commission for the Prevention of Corruption said in Monday's statement that based on the preliminary procedure, the case will not be further processed.
The commission launched the procedure late last year after receiving a report of suspicion of irregularities in the Koper municipality's sale of a piece of land.
It then obtained explanations and documents from the municipality and the Slovenian Institute of Auditors, checked the sale procedure and talked with the appraiser of the land, only to conclude that no breaches within its purview could be established.
It did however detect "certain risks", so it recommended to the municipality to ask appraisers to clearly state in their reports whether the price as appraised includes VAT or not.
Hojs's purchase was problematised last September by Mladina weekly, which alleged he had bought it cheaply because Mayor of Koper Boris Popović was his acquaintance.
It said the city of Koper had decided to sell a building plot which could not be even accessed by road, arguing that had it serviced it before selling it, it could have asked more than EUR 300 per square metre for it rather than just EUR 67.5.
At the April 2017 auction, the land was bought by Rjeckon, a company owned by Russian citizen Marat Idrisov, as the only bidder at the asking price of EUR 262,920 (VAT excluded).
Soon afterwards, the city started serving it with a road and a sewage system, while Idrisov divided it into smaller pieces and sold it on to four buyers, two of whom were Hojs and Popovič.
Hojs bought his 882 square metre piece of land for EUR 75,910 (EUR 86 per square metre), while the price could have been almost 3.5 times higher, said Mladina.
At the time, Hojs told the left-leaning magazine he had reported the purchase to the corruption watchdog. He also denied Popovič had helped him get hold of the land.
