Judge of the Zagreb County Court Ivan Turudić on Monday again rejected the settlement of Uskok with entrepreneur Željko Žužić, who as a co-defendant of former SDP county head Marina Lovrić Merzel admitted to giving her one hundred thousand euros in bribes, although the Supreme Court concluded in December that Turudić could not have rejected the settlement earlier.
After the judge rejected the settlement for the second time, Uskok requested his recusal, and the start of the trial was postponed.
>>>The trial of Marina Lovrić Merzel begins in March
When Turudić first rejected the settlement for a conditional sentence of one year, Uskok filed a request for the protection of legality, which the highest judicial instance accepted at the end of last year. With this decision, the Supreme Court stated that courts should not intervene in the content of settlements between defendants and the prosecution and the circumstances of the case, but only control their legality.
Uskok had previously claimed that there was no basis for rejecting the settlement and separating the record and recording of Žužić’s interrogation in which he implicated the former county head, given that this record is evidence on which the indictment is based and a prerequisite for filing an indictment that has already been confirmed by the indictment council of the Zagreb County Court.
However, the lawyer of the former county head Čedo Prodanović then emphasized that Žužić is an example of how “everything that Uskok serves to the courts no longer passes without question, so their statistics of ninety percent success in such cases are reduced to more reasonable measures.”
>>>USKOK filed an indictment against 9 Croatian and 48 Chinese citizens
Uskok charges Lovrić Merzel that she and her co-defendants are responsible for a series of illegalities – from receiving bribes and money laundering to unjustified payments to consultants, overpaying for the building for the Emergency Medical Service, and spending public money on parties.
Along with this former local power broker, who spent more than five months in pre-trial detention after her arrest, Žužić is also accused along with other actors in this corruption story – the president of the Supervisory Board of Cesta Sisak Silvijo Kobešćak, Bernard Popec who sold the building for the Emergency Medical Service to the county, her nephew Dalibor Rožanković, and the manager in Croatian Forests Zvonko Rožić.
