Following the above-described pre-election promises, the promised clean hands action was launched immediately after the government was formed in July. It was headed by the Minister without Portfolio Jaroslav Bašta. His task was to present tangible results in the form of uncovering and subsequently convicting and punishing a large number of corrupters and tunnelers from the time of the Václav Klaus governments. For some time, it was possible to pretend that something was afoot behind the scenes and that the hand of the law would soon fall on the big fish behind the wild privatisation, the expropriation of state-controlled enterprises and the theft of state family silver. The criminal prosecution of the mastermind of the ODS sponsorship, Milan Šrejbro, who is mentioned in the previous chapter of this book, was considered a success. Šrejbro’s prosecution ended in a fiasco and the Zeman government and Bašt’s hit squad had no part in it. The same was true of the prosecution of former ODS vice-chairman Libor Novak. He even spent a few months in detention in connection with the tax aspects of the same case, but his prosecution, which began long before Zeman and Bašta, ended the same way, i.e. with Novák’s acquittal. However, the strategy of some kind of behind-the-scenes unraveling of the Dolezák plot with typical rhetorical skills of Jaroslav Bašta could not stand after a year and a half. Moreover, the poor results of the action led to mutual accusations of individual Social Democratic politicians as to who was actually to blame. Bašta was therefore super-arbitrated for incompetence in early 2000. The Clean Hands action had practically zero results and in the second half of the period it was only talked about out of inertia.
However, we cannot forget that during the ČSSD government, one big fish was caught. It was even the deputy chairman of the strongest party. The tunneler who ended up behind bars and served several years was Ivo Svoboda, the first finance minister in Zeman’s government. He was one of the figures who were destined for post-Soviet politics. Even under communism, he knew what business was. He worked in managerial positions at Závod přístrojů a automatizace Praha-Čakovice. Towards the end of the former regime he worked for the Hungarian electrical engineering company Videoton.
He was therefore one of the entrepreneurs who knew what possibilities capitalism would bring. And he didn’t want to stand on the sidelines. He knew that the easiest position to get at the money was that of those who would distribute it. And his later career only confirmed this self-interested approach to politics.
To this day, those closest to Ivo Svoboda claim that he was merely a victim of the wild 1990s and that his political partners and the mafia threw everything that threatened them at him. Looking at the facts, however, this natural belief of those close to him seems very naive. Svoboda first became an MP in 1990. By the end of that period, he was already sitting in the Ministry of Finance in 1992. He held the position of deputy.
He was able to use his position and connections from top politics in business. As a politician, he started a business in “economic consulting”. As it later turned out, behind this general job description was advice to privatisers on how to get into state-owned enterprises. He also figured in some companies associated with controversial businessmen or the mafia. He became one of the most powerful men for the ČSSD during this period, but over time he significantly jeopardised the party’s reputation.
ČSSD raised funds for its operations and commissions for its favourable actions towards lobbyists through the companies Tia and Zora Euro, which were staffed by ČSSD economic managers. Sponsorship donations and loans were collected by the above mentioned companies, from where the money was then transferred, if necessary, to the accounts of the company Cíl, which owned the ČSSD headquarters Lidový dům.
The party’s funding arrangements were exposed by an attempted assassination case. In March 1999, a hitman shot the official owner of the company, Tio Ivan Lhotsky, in the head and chest. Lhotsky survived the attack but remained an invalid (he died in 2016). However, it was because of his attempted murder that a police file containing part of the Social Democracy’s accounts was created.
The Social Democrats’ accounts included a donation from a tax haven in Panama, which was only later revealed by leaked documents from Mossack Fonseca from the so-called Panama Papers case. It was a donation from the Beltomate company worth CZK 5 million. Beltomate was founded in 1995 by Roland Schaer in Switzerland. Today, the company is owned by Ľubomír Šidal, who is close to Andrej Babiš. Beltomate donated the money to Zora Euro. It was owned directly by Ivo Svoboda.
There were several indications that Svoboda had constructed a mechanism to funnel black money into Social Democracy. However, the relatively simple corporate corruption network had to be approved by the broader party leadership. This is also evidenced by the controversial move of Prime Minister Miloš Zeman, who appointed Svoboda, who was involved in corruption but also had ties to the mafia, as finance minister in 1998. However, he was soon dismissed from his post as minister in 1999 on suspicion of criminal activity in the previous period, when he worked for the Liberta company.
In 2005, the Prague High Court sentenced him and his advisor, Barbora Snopková, to five years in prison for the embezzlement of Liberty. At that time, he began to have health problems, for which he was released on parole after three years. He suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and died on February 23, 2017, in an institution. His colleague Snopková, who is also convicted of match-fixing commissions from the mafia, still claims to be a political victim and is attacking the state in the media and legally.
