The next big case had to wait about three years. Jaroslav Lízner was a high-ranking official at the time, in 1994. He was the director of the Securities Centre and the Coupon Privatisation Centre. He was therefore the brains behind the whole coupon privatisation process. At that time, even the pigeons on the roof of the National Property Fund on the Rašín embankment were chattering that all was not well in Lízner’s privatisation institutions. This was not unknown even to the police. There were more rumours about Lizner’s problems. These rumours were to be dispelled or refuted after the monitoring of the Asia restaurant.
It was the anti-corruption police who monitored the meeting between Lizner and the manager of Trans World International, Luboš Sotona. During the meeting, Lízner accepted a briefcase containing approximately CZK 8 500 000 under the table. Sotona described the transfer as a bribe for arranging a favourable price for an equity stake in Mlékárna Klatovy. Lizner, on the other hand, claimed that it was an advance payment for the purchase of shares in the company. To the eyes of today’s readers, this theory seems completely far-fetched, but we are in the first half of the 1990s, when pretty much anything was possible. Ivan Jonák had a brothel in Prague’s Libeň where celebrities from all over Central Europe came to sing for him. Václav Klaus openly defended wild privatisation, and the links between organised crime, the tops of the big banks and top officials were in many cases very strong. For this reason, the media’s theory of the legality of the transaction seemed realistic. Pro-Lizner theories also speculated that it was a plot by the anti-corruption police with Sotona to remove an inconvenient official. It was mentioned that the police force in question was on the verge of being disbanded due to its poor performance and therefore needed to catch a big fish. There may not even be that much of a contradiction between these theories: the police may have been trying to flash, Lizner may have been a crook, and it may have been convenient for Soton to sink Lizner. In any case, two years later, the court sent Lízner to prison for six years for bribe-taking and abuse of official authority. Even after serving his sentence, Lízner tried to clear his name, which he never succeeded in doing.This case pushes the consideration of corrupt relations a little further than the case of Mr.Kral described above. The courts were already working a bit more flexibly, the police were already able to document controversial meetings, but a new phenomenon is coming to light – the privatisation processes completely lacked transparency. If minutes were taken of the meetings, as is customary in the civilised environment of the state administration, if it were customary to approve privatisation decisions transparently, and if it were customary to meet in official buildings, there would be no dispute as to whether this was a sham. The police, in addition to documenting the meeting itself, would have waited for a record to be taken by both actors. Depending on what was or was not standing there, it would then be clear whether it was bribery or the then standard exercise of state power. However, this did not happen at the time and so, even after thirty years, a certain aftertaste remains: perhaps the whole transaction was misinterpreted.
