History of Corruption
“This book celebrates our Endowment’s 13 years of fighting corruption. It shows quite clearly that the worst sources of social poison of our time have their roots in the old communist regime and are largely connected to that era’s foreign-trade enterprises and the structures of the secret police. We hope that this account of past and current malpractice will inspire future generations never to give up the fight against corruption.”
Who is behind the book?
Ondřej Závodský
Ondřej Závodský is a lawyer and the winner of several awards for fighting corruption and for his contributions to the development of civil society.
During his law studies at Charles University, Ondřej worked as a journalist covering stories on the police, judiciary and serious economic crime. After graduation he joined the Ministry of the Interior, rising to the position of director of legal affairs. When he blew the whistle on irregular transactions by some of his superiors, he was sacked. Following pressure from the media, he was reinstated, his suspicions were investigated, and his corrupt superiors were dismissed and prosecuted.
For four years he was the Czech deputy minister of finance. Among his achievements were a fundamental gambling reform and legislation to make the management of state property and public tenders on environmental clean-ups more transparent. When Andrej Babiš came to power, he lost his post and joined the Anti-Corruption Endowment, where he helped uncover multiple instances of corruption and wrote several books on the links between public power and oligarchs in Czechia.
He is currently head of the Department for Social Enterprise at the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and the author of a draft bill on work integration social enterprises.
Tomáš Lemešani
Tomáš Lemešani is a journalist and analyst, covering corruption and the struggle against it, public oversight and transparency. He has written for Czech and Slovak media as well as domestic and international anti-corruption NGOs, including the Anti-Corruption Endowment. His books include Dôvod; Z Bureše Babišem on Babiš’s background and behind-the-scenes dealings; Můj stát, moje firma, a follow-up volume on the same man; and, with Ondřej Závodský, Oligarchs and Cronies: State Capture in Post-Communist Czechia. His most recent book, Politika s.r.o., unmasks the Czech populists around Tomio Okamura. He prepared the Czech version, Rusko v plamenech, of a unique book on the emergence of the Kremlin regime, Blowing Up Russia, penned by Yuri Felshtinsky and Alexander Litvinenko, the murdered agent. A follow-up volume on Ukraine by Michael Stanchev, Felshtinsky and Lemešani was published as Ukrajina v plamenech. He runs the Biztweet.cz website and works as an economic analyst.
