Kill the Messenger

by Karl

As I’ve followed the local press here, the thing that has come to overwhelm everything else in my sense of the Czech political scene is the level of corruption (it was part of the context for my post on classical liberalism in Czech politics). It’s not that I don’t think American politics is riddled with corruption, but maybe our politicians are somehow … smoother about it.Whatever the reason, when I’m at home the corruption there doesn’t seem to smack me in the face the way it does here.

A lot of it here has to do with military purchases. As Kate mentioned in her post on David Černý’s Entropa, a Swedish company sold the Czechs some Gripen fighter planes for a vastly inflated price. By law, Czech military purchases from foreign companies are handled through private intermediaries, and the justification for this system is presumably that they can get the government a better deal.  But in fact the best-case scenario is that they replicate work that should be done by people in the Ministry of Defense itself, and the more likely scenario is that they function sort of like a very expensive real estate agent (imagine an agent whose commission is one or two times the price of your house) and open up a huge space for illicit money flows to parties or individual politicians.

The latest mess has to do with the investigation—or the non-investigation—of the purchase of wheeled armored vehicles called Pandurs. The first tip that there may have been something fishy in the whole thing was the fact that the Czech military paid too much for them, and that the Czech Army didn’t actually have much use for them. According to Respekt (Jaroslav Spurný and Ondřej Kundra, “Umlčte Stephana S. – Silence Stephan S.,” June 13, 2011), “they’re mainly for decoration, and the chance of their utilization in a foreign mission is practically zero.” But that was years ago and, as seems to be standard practice here in cases of corruption implicating high government officials, nothing happened.

Then in early May, a couple of Czech news outlets released a deposition from a manager at the company that sold the Pandurs to the Czechs.

The deposition of the Austrian manager shook things up.  Stephan Szücs testified to the investigators that at the end of 2007 Marek Dalík, a close friend of [then] prime minister Topolánek asked for a bribe in the record amount of almost half a billion crowns [roughly $30 million]. According to Szücs this happened at a meeting of the Czech Ministry of Defense with Austrian representatives of the manufacturer of the Pandur, Steyr, a meeting which Dalík, as a private individual, had no business being at. According to Szücs’s deposition, Dalík promised that the bribe would ensure that prime minister Topolánek would approve the purchase of the troop carriers. (“Silence Stephan S.”)

According to Respekt, Czechs at first greeted this as a favorable development, because it forced things to get moving, but it has since turned out to be much more sinister.

Dalík and the other actors in the affair have been given a heads-up and a chance to get their stories straightened out, making it much harder to eventually put together a solid case against them. More seriously, Szücs had testified under a hidden identity, “which was intended to ensure his safety against corrupt officials and mafiosi. Now, in contrast, he’s in hiding out of fear of revenge for his deposition and it’s not clear whether he’ll repeat his testimony in an eventual court case. What’s at stake is his safety and that of his family.”

The Austrian police who took Szücs’s deposition and shared it with the Czechs are, not surprisingly, put out, because everything points to the likelihood that the information was leaked from someone in the Czech justice system. And it was likely someone fairly high up, because the only people on the Czech side with official access to the testimony were the investigator and three or four highly placed representatives of the prosecutor’s office.

The effect goes beyond the heads-up to the suspects and the threat to Szücs. “In addition, in the Austrian police’s record of investigation there is testimony from additional hidden witnesses, and these are now supposedly refusing to repeat their testimony in front of Czech officials, for fear of being uncovered.” Pavel Zeman, the Czech Republic’s chief prosecutor, said simply, “It’s a catastrophe.”

In the words of Respekt, “This humiliating event shows that ‘mafia structures’ in the justice and security apparatus here no longer deal in sweeping politically sensitive cases under the rug, but are actively helping criminals and, in the course of that, threatening the lives of people who decide to testify against them.”

Corruption was a major theme of the national elections last spring. The two largest parties, ODS and ČSSD, were widely regarded as up to their eyeballs in illicit dealings. Many people traced that situation to a “grand coalition” government in the late 1990s involving both parties, because it removed even the minimal oversight that had come from having a serious opposition party. In the 2010 elections, ODS came in second to ČSSD, but they were led by Petr Nečas, a man with a clean reputation who promised to extricate the party from the clutches of the “godfathers” who were using it to ensure their personal success in business. He was able to form a government with a comfortable majority by teaming up with two newcomers on the political scene.

TOP 09 was mainly made up of people who had split off from the Christian Democrats, a party with roots back in the first republic of the 1920s and 30s.  (The new party's name is an acronym for "Tradition, Responsibility, Prosperity." And yes, they know how to spell, it's just that the Czech word for "responsibility" is "odpovědnost"; the other two words are taken from Latin, just like in English.)

Public Affairs (Věci veřejné) was an entirely new creature. While its official chairman was a popular television personality, its real leader was the wealthy co-owner of a private security company. It did remarkably well for a start-up party by promoting a mix of positions from both the left and right parts of the political spectrum, a clear message about reining in corruption, and a candidate slate heavy on attractive women, whose faces were plastered on billboards all over the place.

There were high hopes—perhaps unreasonably high—for serious progress against corruption under the new, clean leadership of ODS, together with the energy of TOP 09 and Public Affairs and backed by a solid majority in parliament. Instead, the government has been immobilized by scandals new and old.  On the new side, one of the fresh faces of ODS was quickly enmeshed in a scheme to direct money to his party out of European subsidies for a new sewage treatment plant in Prague.

On the "old" side, there was the case of the minister of defense and the EU presidency.  The Minister, Alexandr Vondra, had a sterling reputation: as a young man before the 1989 revolution he’d had the courage to sign Charter 77 and in early 1989 became one of its spokesmen; and he’d served as an advisor to President Havel. But more recently he’d been the minister in charge of logistics during the Czech Republic’s presidency of the European Union, and an office under the Minister of Finance dug up—and released—information about a contract signed by his office that was certainly fishy, and that at least raised questions about Vondra himself.

In his new job as minister of defense, Vondra seems to have been making real efforts to clean up the dysfunctional procurement system. The minister of finance has a friend who is one of the “intermediaries” the military has used in its purchasing, and the friend would stand to lose an excellent source of income if the minister of defense were able to accomplish his goals. The obvious question was whether the minister of finance had used the powers of his office to intentionally undermine a fellow minister (although from another party) in the service of protecting his friend.

Public Affairs has become a whole saga unto itself. In the early spring, it was reported that Vít Bárta—the real head of the party, the guy who used to co-own a security company (his brother still has an official stake), and the minister of transportation in the new government—was paying members of his own party for loyalty to him. At least that’s how the recipients of the money described it, though Bárta said the payments were loans. Then a document surfaced from a few years ago, written by Bárta for top managers at his company, describing a plan to create a political party as a vehicle to get enough power in government to steer business toward his company. After that memo was published, the other parties could no longer put up with the chairman of the Public Affairs party being the interior minister (the office with access to information of potential interest to a security firm) so he and Bárta were shuffled out, and ever since then the government as a whole has been hobbled by the question of how long it would even continue in power.

Bárta’s strategic plan for his Public Affairs party may seem extreme, but it’s merely the logical extension of what has become of Czech politics.

“Objectively there’s no reason why a government composed of parties that are ideologically close and which commands such a comfortable majority, should have such problems,” explains Vladimíra Dvořáková, a political scientist from Prague’s University of Economics. “The key is in the fact that the main deciding factor in this government is not ideas, but rather the economic interests of economic groups in the background. Arguments aren’t about ideology, but about who will staff the state, who will get access to resources.” (Silvie Lauder, “Anatomie neúspěchu – The anatomy of a failure”, Respekt, June 13, 2011)

Against that background, the affair surrounding Szücs’s leaked testimony is not all that surprising. It merely shows how far the people pulling the levers in this country are willing to go in pursuit of their real agenda, dividing up the spoils of a moderately wealthy country and laughing all the way to the bank. They’ll pervert the mechanisms of justice into tools of their will. They’ll cripple their relations with a wealthy and important neighbor. And they’ll endanger the lives of people who are trying to do the right thing.

The rot is so deep, it’s not clear how you fix any of it.