As the sun sets on Mirek Topolánek, the length of his shadow, Marek Dalík, grows.

Between 2002 and 2009, or thereabouts, Marek Dalík’s ‘business plan’ was Mirek Topolánek. Dalík’s notorious ability to persuade businessmen to part with large sums of money was based not on acumen or even charm, but simply on his interlocutor's impression that he could 'deliver' Topolánek, at first in his role as ODS chairman and from 2006, as the prime minister.

Such an impression may or may not have been accurate. That is not the point. What matters is that enough people believed it -and that neither Topolánek nor Dalík did much to discourage people from believing otherwise.

Allowing people to think something is not a crime. Dalík is being charged with attempted fraud, not with soliciting bribes for a prime minister. I imagine that the relationship between the two has been immensely rewarding in every sense. But we must not rule out the possibility that Topolánek's only 'crime' was to allow people to think that Dalík had great influence over him. This showed exceptionally poor political judgement, a fact for which Topolánek has had to pay dearly, but it is not unlawful. Today, the former prime minister is the titular head of the local heating association. His reputation and that of his best friend are in ruins.

Let me give you two concrete examples of Marek Dalík and Mirek Topolánek ‘on the job’ in order better to understand the relationship between them. I was partially involved in both cases, so consider me an interested party.

In the first case, in 2007, Dalík came very close to persuading the local meal voucher industry association to hire him to block a move by the then finance minister, Miroslav Kalousek, to abolish the industry’s tax advantage. I advised the association not to participate in any such arrangement with Dalík, on the grounds that it was a colossal waste of money -he was proposing a success fee of EUR 150.000, and a potential risk to the industry’s reputation. The industry association did not hire Dalík.

However, one member of the association, Sodexho Pass, did engage the services of a tiny graphic design studio owned by the younger brother of the person who ran Dalík's PR firm, New Deal Communications. The transfer of EUR 100.000 conditional upon success, was backed by a legal contract, signed in May 2007, for consultancy services between Sodexho Pass and the graphic designer’s company.

The meal voucher affair was widely covered in the media after the contract between the two firms was made public. It caused much embarrassment to all concerned but nothing more. I stress, the contract itself was lawful even if it was bizarre. The legislative threat was duly removed in early 2008, and I assume the contract was honoured in full. We shall never know if the young graphic designer shared his success fee with his big brother’s boss.

Topolánek’s reaction to the scandal was enlightening. The prime minister quickly distanced himself from the uproar surrounding his favourite, and personally initiated a new amendment against meal vouchers. The fact that this amendment failed due to a lack of support from among Topolánek’s own parliamentary club might indicate bad faith on his part, or simply incompetence.

Topolánek’s reaction to Dalík’s arrest earlier this week followed a similar pattern of behaviour. He states that Dalík cannot be guilty of demanding Kč 500.000.000 in exchange for lubricating the wheels of the Pandur deal because he, Topolánek, was trying at the time to cancel the whole deal, which had been so badly negotiated by the previous government led by Jiří Paroubek.

I do not see the logical connection here. It seems that Topolánek finds it impossible to think of himself as separate from Dalík. There is no contradiction between the assertion that Dalík was making or trying to extract money from businessmen based upon their perception that Dalík could ‘deliver’ the prime minister, on the one hand, and on the other hand the assertion that Topolánek was working against the very goal that Dalík was pursuing on behalf of those same businessmen. Both are possible if you assume that Dalík’s interlocutors were greedy enough and gullible enough to believe him.

This, it seems to me, would have been a much better line of defence for Topolánek to take. Instead, he seeks to demonstrate his good faith by doing or claiming to do the reverse of what Dalík is said to be fighting for. The fact that he failed in his efforts, both to destroy the meal voucher industry and to cancel the Pandur deal, might be taken as an indication of the lack of seriousness of his commitment.

In the second example, Dalík tried unsuccessfully to persuade a large American brewer to hire a third party that he had recommended to them, who would assist them in persuading the Czech government to sell them a Czech brewery. You may recall that in early 2007, Topolánek’s government announced that it would begin the process of transforming Budějovický Budvar into a joint stock company in preparation for a possible sale. Naturally this aroused the interest of the Americans. Within a matter of weeks, they were approached by an intermediary claiming to be privy to the thinking of the Czech prime minister. This intermediary, who happens to be running for the presidency (of the Czech Republic, not of the supervisory board of Budvar) was himself hoping for a mandate from the Americans. He indicated that the prime minister was unhappy with the local team engaged by the Americans, and he offered most graciously to arrange for the Americans to meet an adviser to the prime minister, a certain Mr Dalík. They accepted his offer. Dalík repeated that the prime minister would prefer them to work with other advisers and mentioned a name.

Dalík’s recommendation was ignored. A high-level meeting did take place at a location outside the Czech Republic, facilitated by the presidential candidate and attended by the prime minister and his advisor. Nothing came of it. Then the Brazilians acquired the Americans, and the local advisory team was dismantled. And Budvar is still a national enterprise owned by the agriculture ministry. Such is the way of the world.

I tell this second story only to demonstrate what a straightforward fellow Dalík is, and how implausible I consider to be the suggestion that he operated behind the prime minister’s back. As the sun sets on Topolánek's career, the length of his shadow, Dalík, grows. We should believe Mirek Topolánek when he says that he shall stand and fall with Marek Dalík. He speaks and acts as if he has no choice.