Patria case

The Patria case was a political controversy surrounding claims by prosecutors in Slovenia and Austria alleging bribery of Slovenian officials by the Finnish company Patria to help secure an armoured personnel carrier order. Criminal investigations in Slovenia, Finland, and Austria concluded in the mid-2010s. While several individuals were initially convicted, most of these verdicts were later overturned or dismissed. In Finland, all defendants were acquitted due to insufficient evidence. In Slovenia, convictions against key political figures, including Janez Janša, were annulled by the Constitutional Court, and the case was dropped after the statute of limitations expired in 2016. Austria, however, secured one conviction against a middleman involved in the bribery scheme. The CEO stepped down from his position as a result of the affair, but Finnish courts later acquitted all Patria executives due to insufficient evidence. In early September 2008, just three weeks before the Slovenian parliamentary elections on 21 September 2008, the Finnish broadcasting company YLE published an investigation implicating the corruption of the Slovenian Prime Minister Janez Janša.

Janša, who ignored and attacked also the other report about him published in 2013 by the official Commission for the Prevention of Corruption of the Republic of Slovenia, rejected all accusations and called for the journalists to advance some proof for their claims or to withdraw the accusations. On 11 September 2011, the Slovenian national broadcaster RTV Slovenia published a document disproving the claim about Janez Janša being implicated in the corruption and implicating Bartol Jerković, the director of the Croatian heavy industrial company Đuro Đaković Specijalna vozila.