A government fell, an election was held, a mainstream party was wiped out and a billionaire businessman with a communist past is now the most powerful force in politics -all because of a wiretap.



Who would fill the next political vacuum if the Babis bubble bursts?

The new justice minister, Helena Valkova, states this week in connection with the criminal charges laid on Petr Necas that it is good for politicians to be afraid of the public prosecutor. And good for experts as well, one must hope.

Think the unthinkable. Imagine for a moment that Andrej Babis is a ruthless bastard rather than our political saviour. Then imagine that you have just stumbled upon evidence which shows that he intends to abuse the conflict between his primary interest, as finance minister, in collecting taxes and his secondary interest, as the owner of Agrofert, in collecting companies.

Imagine that you take your evidence to the public prosecutor because, like the justice minister, you think it a good thing that people in power fear the long arm of the law. The prosecutor examines your evidence and explains how hard it would be to prove in court that the interest of the finance minister in eliminating fraud had been supplanted by his interest, as an Agrofert shareholder, in eliminating competition. He points out how easy it would be for the defendant’s lawyers to show that the fulfilment of the second objective, while possibly good for their client as an Agrofert shareholder, was an unintended consequence of the fulfilment of his duties as finance minister.

In short, imagine how improbable it is that the public prosecutor could ever prove that the finance minister had abused his powers.

And then recall the fate of Petr Necas and Jana Nagyova.

It is not inconceivable that the law enforcement agencies in this country have a more balanced view of Andrej Babis than his own employees and advisers. Think the unthinkable and imagine for a moment that Agrofert executives sitting in the government and parliament are under police surveillance.

And why would the police not be listening to them? If the police thought is justified to wiretap conversations between a very weak prime minister and his desperate adviser because of suspected abuses of power, they can certainly justify wiretaps on the conversations between a very powerful finance minister and the private sector employees he brought with him into government.

Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that surveillance operations are mounted against the inner circles of government ministers is open to question. As a result of the Nagyova wiretaps, a government fell, an election was held, a mainstream party was wiped off the political map and a billionaire Slovak businessman with a communist past became the most powerful man in Czech politics.

Quite some wiretap! And yet a full eight months on no one has been convicted of any crime. Nor has anyone ever suggested that national security was remotely compromised by Nagyova’s actions and those of her uniformed helpmates in military intelligence.

When all is said and done, Nagyova and the generals were arrested and then released because the prime minister’s sex life had got a bit messy and because his girlfriend did her level best to keep him in power –and in her bed. Public prosecutor Lenka Bradacova states that the arrest of Ivo Rittig yesterday on a charge of money laundering is not directly related to the case of Jana Nagyova, which is being handled by her colleague Ivo Istvan.

It seems to me that the political and financial cost of the June 2013 raids has outweighed the benefits of exposing Nagyova’s telephone calls. Unless the public prosecutor is going to pull a white rabbit out of his hat and make it all worthwhile. Perhaps Ivo Rittig is the white rabbit. Let us hope that Rittig is only the bunch of tulips, and that the white rabbit is Martin Roman. Now that would be something.

For admirers of Babis, of course, no rabbit is now required. His political power and all the good things it promises is more than adequate compensation for them. But for those of us who worry about what comes after the Babis bubble bursts, slinging Rittig in jail for defrauding the Prague Public Transit Company barely scratches the surface of the problem.

And as for Petr Necas, who was charged this week with attempted bribery for offering jobs in state-owned companies to secure the survival of his government, neither his motive nor his method is at all shocking by the standards of most European liberal democracies. If the public prosecutor does eventually succeed in securing a criminal conviction against Necas, his success will be a triumph of legal sophistry and a resounding defeat for common sense.

In comparison to Necas and Nagyova, Babis’s motives and methods are rather hard to decipher. Unlike his legal adviser Robert Pelikan, I can easily imagine a situation in which Babis is tempted to use finance ministry officials to protect his vast array of private business interests from competition. And if he succumbed to the temptation, and he was recorded succumbing? My goodness, what a mess that would be!

Ivo Istvan considered the Nagyova risk sufficient reason to place wiretaps on her conversations with the prime minister and senior intelligence officials. But what, I wonder, is his assessment of the risk that Babis might abuse his much, much greater powers? And more to the point, what is his assessment of the robustness of Czech parliamentary democracy if the finance minister’s hypothetical abuses were ever overheard?

Andrej Babis filled the vacuum created the last time the police mounted a surveillance operation on a government minister. Who would fill the next political vacuum created if the unthinkable were ever to happen and Andrej Babis was to be discredited?

Bohuslav Sobotka? Karel Schwarzenberg? Or that rising star in the political firmament, Tomio Okamura?