Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (BiH’s) Security Minister Dragan Mektic called on citizens to gather in front of the Court and the Prosecutor’s Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina on Wednesday, in response to a corruption affair that happened this week in BiH.
“In order to save the country and ourselves, it is necessary to overthrow this criminal High judicial and prosecutorial council,” Mektic said.
“I will be at the head of this movement,” Minister Mektic added.
Bosnia’s top judicial official became embroiled in a corruption scandal on Thursday after a secretly-filmed video was released showing him allegedly taking bribes through a middleman.
The eight minute video, filmed in November 2018, was published by the Bosnian investigative news portal Zurnal, and shows a an officer named Marko Pandza from the State Investigation and Protection Agency (SIPA) meeting in a cafe with businessman Nermin Alesevic and Milan Tegeltija, the head of the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council (HJPC).
In the video Pandza appears to act as an intermediary between Tegeltija and Alesevic, as they discuss Alesevic’s case, which has been slowly handled by the Canton Sarajevo’s Prosecutor’s Office.
Tegeltija, as the head of the HJPC, the body that appoints judges as well as prosecutors and disciplines them, asks Alesevic for the case number and the name of the prosecutor handling it but does not directly ask for any money or favors from the businessman.
Yet when the three exit the cafe the video shows an exchange between Pandza and Alesevic, in which Alesevic counts out the equivalent of US $1143.6 in Bosnian money and hands it to Pandza, who assures him he will give the money to Tegeltija.
“He will take care of it,” Pandza assures Alesevic.
