Matovic: Kyselica Should Carry Out Thorough Reform of Police
Bratislava, March 18 (TASR) – The strongest party in the future governing coalition, OLaNO, has nominated erstwhile military intelligence chief Roman Mikulec for the post of interior minister due to his leadership skills and the fact that he doesn’t have any links to the Interior Ministry whatsoever, said future prime minister Igor Matovic on Wednesday.
Matovic believes that it would be appropriate for a person who’s never worked at the ministry to put it in order. Meanwhile, former top corruption police investigator Lukas Kyselica, who featured high on OLaNO’s slate, should assist Mikulec in these efforts, probably as his deputy tasked with carrying out a thorough reform of the police.
The future prime minister also indirectly confirmed that his government, scheduled to be appointed on Saturday, could replace current national police chief Milan Lucansky, but he didn’t indicate his possible successor.
Discussing the election of a new prosecutor-general in Parliament due later this year, Matovic said that former justice and interior minister Daniel Lipsic can’t run due to current legislation. [Lipsic was given a three-year suspended sentence in the autumn of 2017 for running over and killing an elderly pedestrian in his car in Bratislava one year earlier. – ed. note].
Nevertheless, Matovic again didn’t indicate who could replace current Prosecutor-General Jaromir Ciznar, while he noted that none of the four coalition parties (OLaNO, We Are Family, SaS and For the People) has any specific candidate to push through at the moment.
Announcing that he’ll nominate the future Slovak Intelligence Service (SIS) director, Matovic again declined to present a name.
Ivan Korcok, current ambassador to the USA and SaS’s nominee for foreign minister, will have to be quarantined for two weeks due to regulations in place in Slovakia for everyone returning from abroad as part of measures to contain the spread of coronavirus.
“Slovakia is facing difficult times, and Ivan Korcok is a top Slovak diplomat. In my view, he’s the most adept to be tasked with representing our country abroad,” said SaS chairman Richard Sulik, adding that SaS vice-chair Martin Klus should become Korcok’s deputy. Klus was originally considered as future parliamentary vice-chairman, but Sulik said that he’ll propose Milan Laurencik for that post.
We Are Family leader Boris Kollar said that he was against so-called cross supervision, with cabinet ministers and their deputies (called ‘state secretaries’ in Slovakia) coming from different coalition parties. However, in the end We Are Family decided to place alongside its future labour minister Milan Krajniak people who ran on slates of parties that didn’t make it into Parliament – Jozef Mihal (formerly Progressive Slovakia-Together, but in the meantime returned to his former party SaS) and Sona Gaborcakova (the Christian Democrats/KDH). A figure from OLaNO should also become state secretary at the Transport Ministry.
As for Mikulec, he was exonerated six months ago by a court of the accusation of endangering confidential information related to the police’s discovery of a microcard containing secret information in his car in 2013. Mikulec stressed that he knows very well who slipped the microcard into his car. “It was a member of military intelligence, and he cooperated with the police officer who found it,” he stated. The incident in 2013 took place shortly after Mikulec pointed to embezzlement within the Military Intelligence Service.
