In writing the following lines, we wondered whether there might be some nostalgia for the good old days of corruption. There is no other name for the set of feelings that arise when we recall the first corruption case of the post-revolutionary era. Indeed, the story described below has a whiff of something from another time, when an honest politician did not even know how it was possible for someone to be dishonest. In the case of the corruptor, on the other hand, we have before us a naive fool who does not understand at all that someone could be different from him, and that he would not be able to agree with someone on a deal that was, after all, so profitable for both parties. However, the situation characterised also contains other typical features, such as completely incompetent law enforcement authorities or the absence of any clear social condemnation.
So let’s get nostalgic about that time. In 1991, the top manager of Agrobanka, Jan Král, tried to bribe the then Czech Prime Minister Petr Pithart. Král and the company he managed had their eye on the building of the former Regional National Committee in Prague’s Smichov district. Well, the King went to Pithart and told him that they wanted the Czech government to approve the sale of the property. He did not, however, argue for any advantage for the state or other public positives: he simply offered Pithart a million crowns to arrange it.
We know the course of the entire corrupt conduct at the then Presidency of the Czech Government in Lazarská Street from the trial of Petr Pithart. He knew that the King would try to bribe him, so he prepared for the meeting. However, the police at the time had no technical means of capturing the proceedings. So there was no parade of hidden technology and documentation by intelligence means, Pithart with his peculiar practicality was alone in this. He rigged up a giant cassette recorder on a radiator under a window in his office, cunningly hid it behind a curtain and started recording. But the recording the tape recorder made was unusable because the machine bounced around on the heater during tram passes. “And he was without evidence,” one might say, the honest man had no way to prove the deed. But we forget that this is 1991, when bribery was done the old-fashioned way, so to speak. The Prime Minister was not left without proof because the King left his offer of corruption on paper. Pithart has already marched this King’s handwritten bribery proposal to the police.
The law enforcement authorities subsequently deployed an agent posing as Pithart’s intermediary against Kral. He, too, managed to obtain King’s handwritten corruption proposal. The trial of the accused King dragged on for much of the 1990s, and the crook eventually walked away with probation and a fine of several thousand dollars. It was a happy ending for the King: in the years that followed, he carried on merrily with his business and was not significantly harmed by the corruption crime.
Summarizing the findings of this isolated case that has reached judgment, we have a showcase of all the problems. First of all, there was no police force to provide service to an honest official, politician or random witness. Next, there was a police force that could not solve the crime expeditiously. We can say to ourselves that Rath was tried for many years too, only Rath put up a little stiffer resistance in the case twenty years later. The judiciary simply did not know how to respond adequately to this kind of crime. The culmination of the botched proceedings is a punishment that cannot be described as anything other than motivational for the King’s successors. We believe that the punishment of a suspended sentence for the then huge bribe must have convinced the generations of corrupters of the 1990s that there was no danger of bribery and that it could be practised without any restrictions.
