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BRATISLAVA, 11 Oct: A court in Slovakia found Wednesday former President Andrej Kiska guilty of tax fraud and gave him a two-year suspended sentence.<\/p>\n
The county court in the city of Poprad also handed him a fine of 15,000 euros (about $16,000).<\/p>\n
The verdict is not final and his legal team said he planned to appeal it. Kiska, 60, had pleaded not guilty.<\/p>\n
The case dates back to 2014 when Kiska was running for president. At the time, he was a successful businessman-turned-philanthropist and a political newcomer.<\/p>\n
According to the court, Kiska illegally included tax receipts from the presidential campaign in the books of his KTAG family company.<\/p>\n
Such activities were not part of the firm\u2019s business.<\/p>\n
KTAG through Kiska\u2019s associate Eduard Kuckovsky then claimed a tax return worth more than 155,000 euros (about $165,000). Kuckovsky also received a suspended sentence and a fine.<\/p>\n
At the time, Kiska beat then populist Prime Minister Robert Fico in the race to become the country\u2019s president for the five-year-termed largely ceremonial post. Kiska\u2019s term in office was marked by clashes with Fico, whose leftist Smer, or Direction, party was tarnished by corruption scandals.<\/p>\n
Kiska supported huge street protests that led to the fall of Fico\u2019s coalition government in 2018 amid a political crisis triggered by the slaying last year of an investigative reporter looking into possible widespread government corruption.<\/p>\n
Pro-West Kiska did not run for a second five-year term in 2019. (AP)<\/p>\n
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BRATISLAVA, 11 Oct: A court in Slovakia found Wednesday former President Andrej Kiska guilty of tax fraud and gave him a two-year suspended sentence. The county court in the city of Poprad also handed him a fine of 15,000 euros (about $16,000). The verdict is not final and his legal team said he planned to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-225940","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}