Timing is everything when it comes to defining a criminal conflict of interest

Interviewed in the Czech press yesterday, an overheated Mirek Topolanek describes the events of recent days as a ‘judicial junta’ by the prosecutor and police, and ‘the greatest threat to freedom since November 1989’ (sic).

We know how overexcited Topolanek gets from those Tuscan holiday snaps, but this is overdoing it! Like so many of his business partners in politics, the man is scared. The justice minister has even compared the police to a ‘lynch mob’.

“But they are just playing the game as it has always been played here”, you will say. How true. But is it legal?

For you and me, ‘trafika’ is their way of defrauding private companies in which the state holds a majority share, by packing the supervisory boards of such companies with their cronies. The difficulty is in proving that fraud has occurred.

For Miroslav Kalousek et al, it is an acceptable and legitimate exchange of badly paid positions on the boards of badly managed state companies in return for loyalty, an essential condition of party coalition building. These people are serving their country by accepting such crummy jobs. They could command a much higher salary in the really private, private sector. And anyway, as Martin Kuba explained, ‘trafika’ is standard political practice elsewhere as well, including in the United States. It is a practice, he insisted, employed by President Barack Obama himself no less, in the appointment of political allies as ambassadors.

Well, perhaps this is not such a good example. The US state department is not, as far as I am aware, a joint-stock company.

Here is a better example of how the US might occasionally choose to deal with ‘trafika’. A decade ago, Boeing was trying to sell its supersonic fighter, the FA-18 Hornet, to the Czech government. Mike Sears was the boss of Boeing’s space & defence division based out of St Louis, Missouri. Sears made a trip to Prague to drum up support for the Hornet campaign, a campaign on which I was working as a lobbyist at the time.

I got to meet Sears, an immensely tall and affable man in a baggy blue suit, several times that year. At an evening reception at the US Embassy in Prague, we greeted each other and shook hands. “I had better count my fingers after shaking hands with a lobbyist!”, he joked.

It was a bad joke. And it got worse. In 2005, Mike Sears was fired as the CFO of Boeing and sentenced to four months in prison for his involvement in the ‘Darleen Druyun’ affair. Druyun, you may recall, is a former US Air Force civilian official responsible for acquisitions. At about the time Sears was counting his fingers, Druyun took a job with Boeing.

In December 2003, the Pentagon announced that it had begun an investigation of allegations of corruption by Druyun involving a $24 billion contract to buy lots of new military aircraft from Boeing. She pleaded guilty to inflating the price of a contract to favour her future employer. In October 2004, she was sentenced to nine months in jail for corruption.

Mike Sears and Darleen Druyun were convicted of criminal conflict of interest because he offered her a job at a time when the terms of the aircraft contract between her future employer and the US Air Force were being negotiated. The court was able to prove that the offer of employment and the terms of the contract were linked.

The lawyer of one of the jailed ODS politicians keeps telling us that the official salaries attached to these sinecures in the Czech Republic are really not that great. But then the official salaries are only the beginning of the story, as the case of Darleen and Mike demonstrates.