People say the finance minister is a rogue but at least competent. Recent events confirm that he is indeed a rogue but destroy forever the notion that he is competent.


Never did this country need more a sober finance minister clearly focused on the state of public finances.

And yet never has the Czech Republic had a finance minister so distracted -this week by hard alcohol and its abuse; last week by EU funds and their abuse; the week before by a punk lawyer and his abuse; and the week before that by Vlasta Parkanová and her abuse.

Indeed, the abuse is never ending.

Never has the country been burdened by a finance minister that has so aggressively intervened in so many matters over which he has no formal powers. And never has it suffered a finance minister so deeply compromised by his failure to exercise the necessary oversight over the distribution of public funds and hard alcohol.

People say that Kalousek is a rogue but at least he is a competent rogue. Here are four fresh examples which demonstrate that people are wrong. Kalousek is an incompetent, trigger-happy scoundrel. He shoots from the hip at anything that threatens him and the clientelist system in which he flourishes and over which he now rules after twenty long and costly years in public office.

Parkanová
For at least a month this summer, Kalousek panicked and insulted in public, harassed police officers in private, and shot himself repeatedly in the foot in a frantic and ultimately futile attempt to stop parliament from lifting Parkanová’s immunity. We can only guess at the worry time the finance minister has devoted to the criminal prosecution of the former defence minister.

Pelikán
The day ODS rebels were derailing his package of tax increases, the finance minister was buried in the blogosphere. So enraged was he by what he found there that he got his ministerial colleagues to reverse their decision to appoint an outspoken lawyer called Pelikán to the ruling body of the Czech Telecommunications Office.

EU funds
The European Commission will impose a penalty of at least 1 billion euro (the equivalent of the annual education budget) on the Czech republic for its abuse of EU funds, an abuse that went undetected by Kalousek’s auditors in the finance ministry, who stand accused by the Court of Auditors in Brussels of having made “systematic adjustments” to reports on EU funding use. Many of the smaller firms that are still owed this money will now never get paid for work completed.

Is this incompetence? Or is it criminal negligence? Kalousek denies all responsibility for the failure of his ministry's auditing methodology, just as he denies all responsibility for the Customs and Excise department's failure to stamp out the black market in hard alcohol. Lemonande Joe did so much better, but then he stuck to Kola loka.

Building societies
This week, perhaps the only place left in the country where they will still sell you a bottle of hard liquor will give its First Reading to an amendment to the Act on Savings and Loans Banks prepared by the finance minister. If approved, starting in 2015 all banks will be able to offer their own building savings schemes under much less restrictive conditions than those which regulate building societies today. This will make it impossible for building societies to compete, and they will eventually be swallowed up by the banks which own them, along with 500 billion crowns of deposits.

Why would a competent finance minister undermine these conservative savings institutions, which are exceptionally safe places to save, in favour of regular banks, which are not? Why would he wish to drive people into the much more expensive consumer credit market?

Are he and Miroslav Singer planning legally to rob the building societies to bail out the banks? Do they fear that Czech banks, like Czech politicians, may one day lose that precious feeling of immunity?

For the finance minister to undermine the building societies is reckless. Likewise to lose 25 billion crowns in EU funds through inadequate oversight. It is reckless of him to block the appointment of an independent regulator on the grounds that the man thinks him a thief. And reckless aggressively to intervene on behalf of a person facing criminal prosecution.

In short, the myth of the Minister of Finance fighting against the wasteful spending of public money is a myth of Kalousek's own making.