The High Criminal Court refused to confirm the messages of Josipa Pleslić ex Rimac as legal evidence in the branch of the affair with wind farms. The High Criminal Court, in one of the cases against Rimac, confirmed the messages as legal evidence and dismissed the appeals, while it has now made the opposite decision. The evidence will now have to be decided again, and two panels of the Criminal Court have reached different conclusions on two identical legal issues, N1 writes.
Riječ is about the part of the Vjetroelektrana affair in which the defendants appealed against the decision of the County Court in Zagreb, which refused to exclude from the court file evidence that they considered illegal. Included are Josip Plesli; ex Rimac, entrepreneurs Milenko Bašić and Dragan Stipić, as well as former minister Gabrijela Žalac.
These are the messages from Josipa Rimac’s cell phone that were found after she ended up under secret monitoring measures, and that was for a completely different case that concerned the Ministry of State Property. That first trial did not result in criminal prosecution, but the investigators used what they learned during it to start tracking Josip Rimac.
– The High Criminal Court of the Republic of Croatia accepted the defendant’s appeals and annulled the first-instance decision of the District Court in Zagreb and referred the case to the first-instance court for a new decision. According to the assessment of the High Criminal Court, the first-instance court in the repeated proceedings should determine whether the evidence that the defendants propose to separate is derived from knowledge gathered on the basis of secret measures according to the initial orders that were determined against other persons. The first-instance court should check whether the initial and all subsequent orders were issued in accordance with the law, in order to check whether these evidences represent “fruits of poisonous grapes”. Also, the defense needs to be able to see the cases of the investigating judge in which the orders for the implementation of special evidentiary actions were issued, the legality of which is disputed – it is written in the decision of the High Criminal Court.
The part of the court process in the Vjetroelektrana affair in which the evidence was declared legal should be continued at the County Court in Zagreb, but now the question is whether the defense will refer to this new case law and demand that the first one be reviewed decision.