Whistleblowers seek exile in Ecuador while financial criminals prefer the safe haven of Prague.


Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is holed up in the embassy in London; Edward ‘Prism’ Snowden is heading for the capital in Quito. Ecuador, it seems, is where whistleblowers fleeing US law feel safest.

But for East European white collar criminals, Prague is preferred. At least this is the finding of one expert in the field, Professor Mark Galleotti of New York University.

Galleotti argues that Prague’s appeal for this more sophisticated criminal type lies in the fact that the city does not feel like the financial crime haven it has apparently become. The Czech Republic is stable enough and comfortable enough to attract them, and small enough and corrupt enough to shelter them.

As Galleotti puts it, Prague is the perfect place to house the wife safely in a second home, and to send the kids to an international school with academic credentials. A dependable banking sector, weak law enforcement, social stability, low levels of violent crime and high levels of corruption together add up to an ideal destination for economic criminals fleeing Putin law.

Galeotti refers to a recent report by ÚOOZ, the Czech police unit dedicated to fighting organized crime. ÚOOZ identifies an alarming expansion of economically targeted criminal activity in Prague involving puppet companies and Czech state entities.

ÚOOZ concludes that "one of the most significant factors supporting the development of organized crime in the Czech Republic is corruption within the public administration. Highly placed civil servants do not merely succumb to corrupt activity; they initiate it."

Those two sentences bear endless repetition as we consider the motives behind the aggressive verbal assault on ÚOOZ by Miroslav Kalousek and others after the ‘unconstitutional’ arrest of some of those 'highly placed civil servants'. The finance minister's rhetoric has become distinctly Latin American. I very much doubt that the gentlemen pictured above take kindly to public prosecutors arresting their girlfriends and business partners either.

If you think it a paradox that Ecuador of all places offers shelter to self-proclaimed champions of open government, then consider how much more of a paradox it is that the ruling institutions of a NATO member state shelter organized crime.

And if you think it a paradox that these institutions shelter organized criminals, then consider how much more of a paradox it is that the leading politicians of this same NATO member state choose to condemn outright the attempts by their very own state prosecutor and police to eliminate that shelter.

In one word, Czekvádor.