30 Oct 14
The head of the EU’s Kosovo rule-of-law mission rejected one of its prosecutor’s claims that it ignored internal corruption allegations and insisted it was investigating the alleged graft.

Petrit Collaku
BIRN
Pristina

Gabriele Meucci, the head of EU rule-of-law mission in Kosovo, told a press conference in Pristina on Thursday that EULEX was probing allegations by suspended prosecutor Maria Bamieh that one of its former judges took bribes.

“Due diligence has therefore been applied thoroughly, in line with what is at the heart of EULEX’s efforts, namely the fight against corruption and impunity,” Meucci said.

Suspended prosecutor Bamieh this week accused her former EULEX colleague, Italian judge Francesco Florit, of taking a 300,000 euro bribe to clear a man accused of murder, as well as seeking another bribe in a corruption case against a Kosovo transport ministry official.

But Meucci rejected Bamieh’s claim that EULEX had not acted to probe her allegations.

“They were not ignored,” he said.

He explained however that he could not give any details about the probe, which is being carried out alongside the Kosovo authorities.

“As this is a criminal investigation, I do not want to dwell on which stage of proceedings each strand of the investigation is at,” he said.

Forit, who is now working as a judge in Udine in Italy, has told BIRN that EULEX did investigate him and found no proof that he was corrupt.

“I have never received, and never been offered, any bribe from anyone… I am telling you that there is nothing true in it,” Florit said.

Bamieh has also accused EULEX of tolerating graft because it failed to investigate her allegations and suspended her from her job instead.

“They are giving out the message that they are not serious about corruption, because if they were serious about it, they would be dealing with it in EULEX,” she told BIRN on Wednesday in an interview.

The graft allegations became public in documents published by Kosovo newspaper Koha Ditore this week.

But Bamieh denied passing the documents to the newspaper and said she only decided to speak out because EULEX suspended her.

“They suspended me for giving documents to the press, which I didn’t do. I never gave documents to Koha Ditore. That suspension destroyed my image in Kosovo, so I had to go public,” she said.

EULEX deals with cases of organised crime, corruption and war crimes which are considered too important or sensitive to be handled by the Kosovo judiciary.