The Counterterrorism and Extreme Violence Section of the Criminal Police Directorate at the General Police Directorate recently prepared a pamphlet on blackmailing the owners and tenants of inns and other entertainment facilities and sent it through criminal police sectors at police directorates across Slovenia to inns and other entertainment facilities located in individual police jurisdictions.

For different reasons, it is not common for victims to report such criminal offences, and therefore the police wish to encourage victims to decide in favour of reporting offences to the police.

Slovenian police often encounter blackmailing, when perpetrators of criminal offences by means of aggressive methods, for instance by threatening and using physical force, demand payments for inn protection from tenants and owners of profitable inns and facilities. In the background there may be factual or even fictional debts. Blackmailers demand that entrepreneurs pay large sums and thus "enable" the normal functioning of the inn or company. Blackmailing can be undertaken by individuals or groups of blackmailers. From our experience, blackmailers demand more and more money from their victims, and therefore payment of such a "debt" or "security" is not the solution.

We urge all victims to report such criminal offences to the police. This can be done in several ways: by calling the police phone number 113 or anonymous phone number 080-1200, reporting the offence on the web site www.policija.si or by personally going to the nearest police station.

The police will do everything possible to track down the perpetrators, i.e. blackmailers, protect the victims and provide for their safety.

Blackmailing (Article 218 of the Penal Code)

(1) Whoever, with the intention of unlawfully acquiring property or collecting a debt for himself or a third person, by use of force or serious threat coerces another person to perform an act or omit to perform one to the detriment of his or another's property shall be sentenced to imprisonment of not more than five years.

(2) Whoever, with the intention of unlawfully acquiring property or collecting a debt for himself or a third person, threatens another person with disclosure of any matter concerning him or his relatives which is capable of damaging his or his relatives' honour or reputation, thereby compelling that person to perform an act or omit to perform one to the detriment of his or another's property shall be punished to the same extent.

(3) If the offences under the first or second paragraphs of the present article have been perpetrated by at least two persons or if they have been perpetrated with the use of arms or a dangerous weapon or in a particularly brutal and humiliating manner, the perpetrators shall be sentenced to imprisonment of not less than one and not more than eight years.