The first Substack post, written by our founder as she was waiting for the outcome of a child custody case where several professionals were under investigation by the Croatian Office for Corruption and Organised Crime

The family court crisis is undermining public trust in the entire justice system, laying bare corruption, ineptitude and complete lack of governance.

This is a screenshot from a letter showing that the case file from my children’s custody case was seized by USKOK, the Croatian Anti-Corruption and Organised Crime Office, shortly before 25 October 2022. A decision on child custody was handed down on 11 November, completely ignoring the implications of the investigation on the case.

Data leak

In February 2022 I filed a report to the Croatian State Prosecutor against four members of staff at the Zagreb Maksimir Centre for Social Welfare in Croatia. In July 2021, Zagreb lawyer Ines Bojic had submitted a pile of documents from this Centre’s case file to the court hearing our child custody case on behalf of my ex husband, Zvonimir Marinovic, a former spy and current senior civil servant in the Customs Directorate of the Croatian Ministry of Finance.

The leaked documents included my emails to staff members at the Centre and other people, as well as papers marked confidential. My lawyer and I had asked social worker Vesna Mostak Skupnjak to see just one of those papers. She consulted her colleague, lawyer Ana Markesic, who confirmed that they could not give me that paper as it was confidential. That was a correct and lawful answer.

Ines Bojic and B.a.B.e.

So how did the papers get into the hands of lawyer Ines Bojic? (Ines is, incidentally, the lawyer for the best-funded Croatian women’s NGO, B.a.B.e.). My children told me that they saw on Dad’s mobile phone WhatsApp messages from Ines sending him documents.

I reported Ines Bojic to the Croatian Chamber of Lawyers. They investigated, but found no evidence of wrongdoing. Not surprisingly, as I later came across reports of lawyers with multiple convictions for criminal offences and misdemeanours who are still practicing law in Croatia. Zvonimir’s friend, who I fondly refer to as Fascist Stipe, is one of them. He is connected with the Croatian Christian Democratic Union, the intelligence services and sex scandals.

Not long after the Chamber dismissed my complaint, its President resigned from his position, himself under investigation for money laundering in connection with the Croatian state oil company, INA. I wonder if this will improve standards at the Chamber, and in the profession? I won’t hold my breath. This is Croatia, the most corrupt EU Member State.

But in family law, around the world, conflicts of interest and corruption are the norm, not the exception. Ines Bojic represents vulnerable womem who are victims of domestic abuse, and provides advice via the B.a.B.e. helpline. She also represents perpetrators. She could be “ambulance chasing” victims and harvesting information that would help her when representing violent men. This kind of practice is seen from Camden to California.

Cover-up

Who was responsible for passing my confidential documents to Ms Bojic, on behalf of the civil servant Zvonimir Marinovic, with the aim of undermining me in our child custody case, violating my rights and the rights of our children?

In February 2022, I wrote to the Head of the Zagreb Maksimir Centre for Social Welfare expressing my concerns about the information leak and about abuse of power affecting my case. Here is the letter the Head, Ms Jasna Cesarec sent back:

This is a very typical communication from the Croatian authorities, full of copy-pasted legalistic blah blah which I won’t bother translating. My lawyer advised me that the answer was completely unlawful.

If Ms Cesarec as the Head of the Centre is prepared to cover up unlawful acts, she has legal liability. And it makes me wonder if she was the one who instructed her staff to leak the documents.

I should make clear here: front line staff at the Centre said to me on more than one occasion that they suspected Zvonimir Marinovic was using his influence to get the outcomes he wanted in other government bodies, even where to do so was clearly harmful to the children. They advised me to go to the media.

Unfortunately, most victims of the family court know it’s not easy to get media coverage. The media are inundated with reports like this, and they know that reporting on them could get them in legal difficulties.

Scandal-hit

The Zagreb Maksimir Centre for Social Welfare has for years been the focus of accusations of malpractice, notoriously in the case of Severina Kojic, a Croatian celebrity pop singer. In 2021 after journalist Jelena Jindra published a long investigative piece into the singer’s allegations, the Ministry of Social Policy took action and found 20 instances of procedural errors.

The aforementioned article shows that Severina also made allegations against the Croatian Centre for Legal Guardianship. So have I.

Another recent case involving Maksimir was of a young woman who was beaten until her bones were broken and was stuffed into the boot of a car while handing over her child for unsupervised contact with her assailant, who had a conviction for violent assault. The mother was only saved by the chance intervention of passers-by. She reported in September 2022 that the Zagreb Centre was threatening to take her child into care following the father’s release from prison. The Ministry only took action after the media reported on the case for the second time.

“Parental alienation”

In July 2022, in a 180 degree about face from the previous year, and AFTER I reported them to the State Prosecutor, Jasna Cesarec, the Head of the Zagreb Maksimir centre, signed off a report accusing me of “alienation” – not from my children’s father, but from Croatia itself and the children’s family there. However, almost all the children’s family in Croatia is on my side and as a direct result of the actions of their father and of the Croatian authorities they are now completely cut off from them.

For the uninitiated, in the family law system, if you do not agree with every intervention forced upon you, from changing your country of residence (also known as being trafficked), to accepting coerced treatment based on fraudulent diagnoses, you are labelled as an “alienator”, or with mental health or personality disorders and punished with the removal of your children. Your children are effectively trafficked into the hands of an abuser. The same happens when parents report malpractice, fraud and other crimes which are the rule, not the exception in family law.

In my family’s cases, after 6 years of the Croatian institutions making an utter mess of our lives, and after two forced removals from me, my children were starting to show signs of distress. So what do the social workers do? Do they get the mess sorted out? No!! They want to push the children into therapy. And they most DEFINITELY do not want you, their mother, to talk with the children about what you are all going through. That would be alienation!

The name of the game here is money. They can destroy children’s mental health, and then set up business to fix it with “therapy” – this resembles conversion therapy, otherwise practiced in political reeducation camps. It’s institutional gaslighting for children, completely untested and with no proven results. One UK lawyer described it as experimenting on children.

Protect victims

My children do not want to be stuck in legal limbo and torn between two homes. I tried letting them go for all our sakes, but that didn’t work at all. And it’s not safe to leave them with a father who abducted them and has the criminal profile of a dangerous and unpredictable man.

I have to make very clear here that all of this is exactly the outcome my ex husband wanted. He threatened me explicitly that he would corrupt the court process, that the children would live with him if I didn’t do as he said, and that he would see it took so long I would give up all hope of getting the children home. I wonder if he is capable of even giving a thought to the children’s needs and feelings. I have asked him to. He just ignores me.

We need our problem sorting out. It’s not difficult and it should have been done right at the beginning, when he kidnapped the children. My children want to be free to live normal lives. They don’t want to be stuck in endless meetings with “expert witnesses” who ignore them and therapists who brainwash them into normalising everything we have been through.

My kids need my support. I am their mother, and they recognise me as the one who has always upheld their wishes and understood their needs. No untrained halfwit is going to endanger the mental health and wellbeing of my children.

Suspension

However, the Ministry of Social Policy refused to conduct an investigation into how all four staff members at the Zagreb Maksimir centre who are under investigation were not only still in their posts, but allowed to continue working on my children’s case. They should have been suspended until they were cleared or charged with serious criminal wrongdoing which could have entailed a prison sentence.

Predictably, they weren’t convicted because the Croatian Government has a very cosy relationship with corruption.

However, it is no different in the UK, USA and other countries where social workers and others are allowed to practice regardless of complaints, investigations, sexual harrassment allegations, criminal convictions, etcetera.

Despite me raising the alarm at the court, and with the Croatian, EU and UK authorities that allowing the testimony of people under investigation for corruption and organised crime was about to cause a dangerous miscarriage of justice, the judge completely refused to take into account the investigation, letters from professionals, reports from the UN and other bodies about the risks of the use of the misuse of “Parental Alienation” allegations, and the testimony of the expert witnesses themselves that they ignore and minimise domestic abuse and do not carry out thorough assessments. The Croatian and British Governments ignored my requests for help, and the European Commission whitewashed it.

Addendum: Two years later, the outgoing Commissioner for Justice was under investigation on suspicion of money laundering.