Prime Minister Igor Matovič (OĽaNO) is the third high-ranking Slovak politician within a short period of time, who has had to face a public defense of his thesis due to alleged plagiarism. On Wednesday's press conference, Matovič based his defense of his 1998 master thesis on the claim that he was unaware of the fact that he had stolen texts from other authors. "Plagiarism is when you knowingly don't cite the author," stated Matovič, adding that the lack of citation was unintentional. According to an analysis by Denník N daily, 76 out of the 79 pages of PMs thesis were copied word-for-word from two publications.
"I've never attempted to hide the fact that my thesis was based on the studies in question and I'm confident that I also cited them directly in my diploma thesis," said Matovič on Wednesday. Since he was unaware of his wrong doings, he had dared to criticise other politicians in the past for similar cases. He added that he had handled the finals quite well and has never been boastful of his academic degree, moreover, had he felt there was anything to hide, he would have withdrawn the thesis from the university library.
When asked by reporters whether he would give consent to have it published and submitted to the anti-plagiarism check, Matovič replied that he had not seen his thesis for 20 years and did not even want to see it. He blamed journalists for not seeking the truth and claimed that they fail to listen properly. As an alternative to publishing the diploma thesis, Matovič suggested that he is willing to undertake a lie detector test abroad. The Prime Minister also declared that Denník N daily reported on his academic work in a "purpose-built" and "insidious" manner, as the story came out on the day he left Slovakia for a summit in Brussels. According to the Denník N journalist Mária Benedikovičová, she had sent her findings to the Governments office prior to publishing her article, yet she did not receive any answers.
Comenius University does not consider it necessary to further investigate Prime Minister Matovič's thesis. During the summer, the university plans to update guidelines for supervisors and reviewers in assessing copied texts as well as strengthen the support for resource-based texts with proper citations, and review the possibilities for expanding anti-plagiarism system licenses.
