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Friday, 19.04.2024, 07:30
Corruption Prevention Bureau closes criminal probe over attempted bribery in Magonis' case
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The pretrial investigation has been completed and on September 11 a decision has been made to close the case due to lack of crime, KNAB reported.
Jurass said that this decision has been predictable because investigation in the case had been delayed and formal. “I can only voice my regret that, in fact, everything possible has been done in order not to uncover the crime,” he said.
Information about the alleged crime was published in February 2017. Jurass then indicated, however, that about a year and a half had passed since the attempted bribery already and that this was a very long period of time. “The more time has passed the more difficult it is to prove a crime, let alone a crime requiring specific investigation techniques that have to be used from the very beginning,” Jurass said.
“The information I provided was ignored. It was only after a public statement and media involvement that somebody apparently realized that this cannot be ignored so easily,” the former KNAB official said.
As reported, Jurass, who was fired from his job by the Corruption Prevention Bureau's chief Jaroslavs Strelcenoks, said in an interview with Ir magazine that he had been offered a EUR 1 mln bribe in return for changing the charges brought against former head of Latvian Railways (LDz) Ugis Magonis - from bribery to trading in influence, which carries a much lighter sentence.
According to Jurass, he reported the attempted bribery to Strelcenoks, but no investigation followed - not to Jurass' knowledge at least.
The Corruption Prevention Bureau later said that Jurass had said too much and therefore significantly impeded the bureau's investigation into his allegations.
As LETA also reported, Corruption Prevention Bureau officers detained Magonis in the summer of 2015. He is suspected of accepting a EUR 500,000 bribe from Estonian millionaire Oleg Ossinovski so that Latvijas Dzelzcels subsidiary LDz Ritosa Sastava Serviss would purchase four old locomotives for several million euros from Ossinovski's company Skinest.
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