Savisaar, Kofkin's Action Against Prosecution Rejected by District Court
Tallinn District Court dismissed a complaint by Tallinn Mayor Edgar Savisaar and entrepreneur Aleksander Kofkin over the prosecutor's decision to open a criminal investigation into a loan taken by Savisaar.
The decision follows a similar verdict by the Harju County Court in June, and Savisaar and Kofkin now have ten days to lodge a complaint with the Supreme Court, Postimees reported today.
The pair have already knocked on the doors of the Supreme Court, which rejected the action in March saying that the matter must first be dealt by a county court, not an administrative court.
Savisaar and Kofkin lodged their initial complaint at the Tallinn Administrative Court in October in an effort to "suspend the processing of personal data, to refute incorrect facts and to establish illegal disclosure" of information in the ongoing investigation into the Savisaar loan, reported Postimees in December.
Savisaar and Kofkin also asked for compensation for damage to reputation.
Though the Prosecutor's Office has released few details of the loan case itself, media reports indicate that it involves the section of the penal code dealing with money laundering. The office is looking into a 173,000-euro loan that Savisaar took from a Panama-registered company in 2009. It has requested and obtained documents from Switzerland concerning the case.
Through lawyers, Savisaar said in July that the loan has been repaid for by royalties from his already published and promised books.
Kofkin's participation in the court case against the Prosecutor's Office is explained in an article in the official Tallinn newspaper Pealinn, which wrote that the Prosecutor's Office claimed Kofkin may have paid a kickback to Savisaar for winning a tender for setting up a chain of sausage kiosks and for rights to build a hotel. The newspaper noted that Savisaar had taken out a personal loan of around 34,000 euros from Kofkin.