Who is abusing who?


TOP 09 politician and labour minister, Jaromír Drábek, accused the police of political machinations after his deputy, Vladimír Šiška, was arrested yesterday morning. The minister claims that the timing of the arrest ten days before an election is scandalous.

If, like me, you are experiencing a strong sensation of déjà vu, then no wonder: a couple of months ago, Miroslav Kalousek reacted in the same way, when the police asked parliament to lift the immunity of the ministers' party colleague, Vlasta Parkanová, who is now facing prosecution.

If Drábek and Kalousek are to be believed, it is all a grotesque abuse of police power. The similarities between the two TOP 09 ministers, however, does not end with their distrust of this country’s law enforcement officers.

Under the guise of 'reform', both men are busy centralising and concentrating power in their own hands. Both would like us to believe that ‘reform’ saves public money. In Drábek’s case, the ‘reform’ involves the creation of a single, national employment office and the centralisation of the distribution of social benefits. In a nutshell, this means the replacement of hundreds of civil servants with thousands of ATMs, into which you insert your Social Card.

The arrest today of first deputy labour minister Vladimír Šiška and the head of the ministry’s IT department, Milan Hojer, arouses the suspicion that what Drábek likes to present as a straightforward transfer of funds from municipal to central government is, in actual fact, a straightforward transfer of public funds into private hands. And the fact that two such pairs of hands were until recently attached to the arms of the minister and his first deputy is not irrelevant.

The firm iDTAX was owned by the two gentlemen before it was sold to Vitkovice IT Solutions, which is a supplier of the IT infrastructure for Drábek's new centralised system. iDTAX specializes in electronic sales receipts, which are being touted by Drábek & Šiška as the main tool for monitoring the abuse of social benefits.

To learn more about iDTAX and its clients, you may read this presentation in Czech by its former owner, the former managing director of the international chamber of commerce and presumably, now the former deputy minister of labour and social affairs, Vladimír Šiška.

I am told that the finance ministry, upon the urging of Zdeněk Juračka of the Association of Trade and Tourism (SOCR), is contemplating the introduction of electronic sales receipts for all merchants who are not using classic cash registers, as a way to cut tax evasion on sales transactions.

Juračka is a longstanding acquaintance of Miroslav Kalousek. Their relationship goes all the way back to the early 1990s, when Jednota was being restructured into COOP and Kalousek was in the Office of the Government as a senior advisor to the Deputy Prime Minister focusing on economic transformation. Juračka was appointed chairman of the board of the newly created hub for all Jednota retailers, COOP Centrum, in 1993. Today, he is running for the Senate on the TOP 09 ticket.

The spotlight should now be turned upon all ministries that have placed contracts with iDTAX and its owner, Vitkovice IT Solutions. It will then become clear whether it is only TOP 09-led state institutions that display this weakness for a system of electronic sales receipts supplied by iDTAX.