Prosecutor's office dismisses request to end Danske Bank case proceedings
The Office of the Prosecutor General has dismissed an application filed at the beginning of October for proceedings in the criminal case related to Danske Bank to be terminated on the grounds that, since the materials of the case have become known to all judges via the media, impartial court proceedings in said case are no longer possible.
In the same application, a request was made for a new criminal investigation to be opened to find out about the circumstances of the Danske Bank materials' ending up in the media.
The prosecutor's office also dismissed that application, press spokesperson for the Office of the Prosecutor General Kairi Kungas told BNS on Friday.
According to the prosecutor's office, there is not a single base arising from the law for the termination of the criminal proceeding.
Both orders of the Office of the Prosecutor General where the applications were dismissed have been challenged, BNS has learned.
In October, Martin Hirvoja, attorney for two Danske Bank officials alleged to have been complicit in the mass-scale money laundering scheme which broke in the media last year, presented an application to the state prosecution to terminate criminal proceedings.
Between September 22 and October 2, materials from the Danske pretrial investigation were published in very large amounts in several Estonian media publications as well as the Italian one. It appears from the newspaper articles published that the entire criminal file may have been leaked.
Hirvoja's law firm, Magnusson, said the leak makes it not possible to fulfill the requirements applicable to an adversarial judicial procedure.
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Editor: Helen Wright
