Finance minister blames Vondra for huge financial loss

Prague, Feb 3 (CTK) - Czech Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek says in daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) yesterday that the contract the Government Office signed with the Promopro firm in 2009 stripped the state of hundreds of millions of crowns, for which he indirectly blamed Alexandr Vondra, current defence minister.

Vondra (Civic Democrats, ODS) was Czech deputy prime minister for EU affairs, also in charge of the Czech EU presidency in the first half of 2009. The media have reported about a controversial contract for audiovisual services the Government Office then signed with Promopro. It paid 551 million crowns for the order, a sum Kalousek (TOP 09) calls outrageously high.

"The public finance was undoubtedly stripped of a high sum. Hundreds of millions of crowns were definitely in question...Margins is a decent word, which is not suitable to use in [describing] this case," Kalousek told HN, hinting at Promopro that gained the lucrative order without a tender.

Vondra dismissed Kalousek's words, HN writes.

"I don't know what margins worth hundreds of millions of crowns he means. [Margins] for Omnipol? What margins does Miroslav Kalousek consider morally acceptable and what unacceptable? Are [the margins] for Omnipol acceptable and the rest unacceptable? I don't know and I even cannot know what margins the firms that assisted to the Czech EU presidency applied, but it is mathematically impossible for them to reach hundreds of millions," Vondra said.

Omnipol, an armament company that has mediated a number of foreign equipment supplies to the Czech military, was headed by Kalousek's old friend Richard Hava in the past.

Kalousek held the post of deputy defence minister in the 1990s, and he headed the lower house budget committee in 2002-2005. He was finance minister in the previous government of Mirek Topolanek (ODS) in 2007-2010.

A former Christian Democratic Union (KDU-CSL) leader, he initiated the establishment of a new conservative party, TOP 09, last year. He is TOP 09's first deputy chairman.

Government spokesman Jan Osuch said on Tuesday that the Government Office, at which Vondra's section in charge of EU affairs and presidency was based, paid almost 551 million crowns to Promopro, VAT including.

The media, politicians and Promopro each referred to a different sum in this connection in the past days.

The case surfaced last week when the Finance Ministry's Financial and Analytical Department said it had filed a criminal complaint about the suspicious Promopro order.

Vondra said he had not negotiated the contract nor did he know about it. He said the then Government Office head Jan Novak was responsible. Novak dismissed this.

Kalousek says in HN that the sum the Government Office paid to Promopro was "outrageously and nonsensically high."

He says he is disgusted at Vondra "spitting" [at others] in an effort to defend himself.

According to Kalousek, the Promopro case is more serious than the alleged corruption affair that hit the Environment Ministry in December and forced then minister Pavel Drobil (ODS) to resign.

Both Drobil and Vondra are deputy chairmen of PM Petr Necas's senior ruling ODS.

($1=17.481 crowns)