Scandal-hit Slovak central bank governor Peter Kažimír will have to wait until next week to discover if corruption charges against him will be dropped after a government change to the statute of limitations.

Kazimir,  a prominent hawkish member of the European Central Bank's Governing Council, is accused of bribing former head of customs František Imrecze while he was finance minister, according to Imrecze’s testimony. 

Last April, Kažimír was found guilty of bribery by the country’s Special Criminal Court and fined €100,000. Kažimír has appealed the case. 

He is just one of many onetime officials of the ruling Smer party who were investigated for corruption under the previous centre-right coalition government but who are now benefiting from the return of the leftist party to power and the legal changes it has pushed through to lower penalties for financial crime and shorten the statute of limitations for past offences.

Kazimir was finance minister between 2012-2019 and the offence was allegedly committed in 2017.  Charges were pressed in 2021, after the centre-right government entered office the year before. Following the Smer government-backed changes to the criminal code, the statute of limitations to corruption cases such as Kažimír’s was shortened to three years, the liberal daily DennikN wrote.   

Given the change to the statute of limitations, Kažimír’s lawyers now want the case to be dropped altogether. A court proceeding to decide this has been suspended until December 9.

“The main [court] proceeding should not continue. The judge could have literally stopped [it] himself at a table, cancelled the date and delivered us the statement on stopping the criminal prosecution” Kažimír’s lawyer Ondrej Mularčík told Slovak media.

“How he will do and what he will do by December 9, I don’t know,” Mularčík added.

Kažimír’s side argues that the court needs to rule based on the legislation valid today, which is favourable to Kažimír, rather than on the bill which was valid at the time the crime was committed, the country’s state broadcaster STVR highlighted.  

However, a new scandal potentially involving Kazimir was published by DennikN last week. It published an extensive investigation documenting how Kažimír’s girlfriend Katarína Korecká  bought a €1.5mn villa in southern 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 Kazimir alleged involvement in the Imrecze bribery case and the French Riviera villa scandal, Kazimir is also a witness in the large corruption case dubbed “Mýtnik“ (“customs officer”), which also allegedly involved Brhel, and resulted in €45mn damages to the state in overpriced IT tenders, according to prosecutors.