If Andrej Babis were serious about defusing his conflicts of interest, he would not put his business partners alongside him in government.



Spot the difference!

Andrej Babis used a coalition press conference on Monday to boast about Lovochemie’s commitment to the environment. And in a breath taking leap of logic, he then dismissed as ridiculous the suggestion that Lovochemie’s Richard Brabec, the country’s next environment minister, has a conflict of interest.

It is Babis who is making himself ridiculous. Lovochemie is obliged by law to invest in clean technologies. The fulfilment of Lovochemie’s legal obligations in no way defuses the conflict of interest of the next environment minister.

If you doubt this, consider how absurd it would be if the owner of ArcelorMittal Ostrava were to justify the appointment of the firm’s chief operating officer as minister of environment on the grounds that the country’s largest steel maker had invested a billion crowns in new filters to reduce dangerous emissions.

Andrej Babis displays the tendency of many successful men to drink their own bathwater. I have no doubt that he actually believes the drivel he spouts, a deformity of character that comes with too much power. But this is no reason for the rest of us to believe him.

Three ANO ministers are sharply conflicted. The risk that Andrej Babis as finance minister, Richard Brabec as environment minister and Antonin Prachar as transport minister will allow their decisions as members of the government to be influenced by their private interests is very real.

There is nothing wrong in these private interests. What is objectionable is the probability that these private interests will motivate their behaviour as government ministers.

If Babis were serious about defusing these risks, he would not place his business partners in government alongside him.

Now that we appear to be stuck with three conflicted ministers, what should be done to mitigate these conflicts? The answer is transparency, lots and lots of it. We need to know much, much more about the business relationships of the Agrofert conglomerate in order effectively to hold Babis and his business partners accountable.

Zuzana Kubatova writes today on Actualne.cz about the conflict of interest created by the fact that Explosia, the state-owned explosives company which falls under the finance ministry, is a business partner of Babis’s Synthesia. State financial support of Explosia indirectly profits Synthesia. This conflict can be managed as long as we know exactly how Synthesia benefits from its business relationship with Explosia.

For this we need an active state competition authority staffed by competition economists capable of examining the various markets in which Babis’s companies operate. In particular, UOHS needs to establish whether any of the numerous Agrofert companies are making the sale of one product contingent upon the sale of another of its products, a practice known as ‘bundling’ –a nasty habit of conglomerates.

And what we do not need is Andrej Babis using his enormous economic, political and media power to rubbish those who point out that he and his ANO colleagues about to enter the government are conflicted. They are.