On Monday, the Kuciak murder trial continued with the hearings of Norbert Bödör and Jaroslav Haščák. Bödör is a businessman whose companies earned large sums of money by providing services to the state. Haščák is the head of Penta, one of the largest financial groups in Slovakia.
According to Peter Tóth's testimony from last week, Bödör co-financed the spying on journalists including murdered Kuciak. Bödör has testified that he had known the accused Marian Kočner for 10 years, but did not have business deals with him. Kočner told him a few times that he was annoyed by how journalists were writing about his business deals and that he planned to fight back by revealing some information about them. Bödör said he knew Ján Kuciak had written about him too but did not read those articles because he was not interested. He said he did not help Kočner to collect info about journalists. After Kočner was arrested, Peter Tóth contacted Bödör with the question of how he could help Kočner and he offered to help his family if necessary.
Co-owner of Penta financial group Jaroslav Haščák also testified in court. In his testiomny he claimed that certain text messages he had exchanged with Marián Kočner were about former head of the Gorilla investigation team Lukáš Kyselica. In claiming this he denied that the messages referred to Jan Kuciak or that Kočner had disclosed to him his plans to kill the journalist.
The Gorilla case is a political corruption scandal named after a Slovak Secret Service wiretap file.
We will keep you up to date with the latest development as our colleague Anca Dragu is at the trial.
