Prague, May 19 (CTK) – Czech ANO chairman and outgoing Finance Minister Andrej Babis plans another step to formally cut himself off from the media he owns by transferring the Mafra publishing house from a trust fund to a NGO or more probably to a foundation, daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) writes Friday.
Mafra issues the influential national dailies Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) and Lidove noviny (LN).
Babis announced the planned change shortly after the recent emergence of controversial audio recordings of his talk with a MfD journalist in a suspected attempt to use the independent newspaper against his political opponents.
The controversial recordings, and also Babis’s dubious business activities, made Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka (Social Democrats, CSSD) propose his dismissal to President Milos Zeman in early May.
Sobotka said Babis had lied when he previously asserted that he would never influence the media he owned.
Babis’s influence on “his” media has also been criticised by Czech lawmakers, and the threat it may pose will be discussed by the European Parliament on June 1, HN writes.
Babis’s Agrofert company acquired Mafra in mid-2013, a few months before the general election that catapulted his ANO movement, a political newcomer, to parliament.
This February, Babis transferred Agrofert, a giant chemical, agricultural, food and media holding, to two trust funds in compliance with a new conflict of interest law.
Now he plans to take Mafra out of the relevant trust fund, HN writes.
“I will ponder on what to do with the media that are a part of a trust fund to bring them out of the fund’s reach,” Babis is quoted as saying.
He does not plan to sell Mafra, though his fellow ANO member and EU commissioner Vera Jourova has advised him to do so.
According to HN’s information, he is seeking a foreign model to follow and is pondering on whether to transform Mafra into a foundation.
Babis dismisses planning this as a step to prevent his own meddling in the content of MfD articles, which, he says, he has never done. The reason of his plan lies elsewhere: he wants to prevent Mafra journalists from being attacked over their alleged links to the ANO movement, HN writes.
“I am convinced that never before have Mafra journalists been as free as under me [as the owner],” Babis said.
Tomas Trampota, a media expert from the New York University in Prague, is of a different view. He said the formal status of Mafra is not as important as the staff controlling Mafra’s operation.
“Everything often depends on the extent of personal interconnection, because quite often a firm’s manager is a person standing so close to the former owner that nothing actually needs to be changed and nothing changes. I am sceptical in this respect,” Trampota said, commenting on Babis’s plan.
If Babis cuts himself off from the media even more, he might use it as an argument in disputes with his opponents who blame him for influencing newscasts, HN writes.
Sobotka previously said Babis’s media-related statements are untrustworthy because in 2013, he vowed not to interfere in the Mafra’s work but the journalists who eventually left Mafra, confirmed that the opposite was true.
Mafra’s future status is not known. “No concrete steps have been planned, which is why we have nothing to comment on for now,” Agrofert’s spokesman Karel Hanzelka is quoted as saying.
Newspapers with a foundation status are nothing unusual abroad, Trampota said, giving numerous French papers and Britain’s The Guardian daily from the 1930s to 2008 as an example.
A foundation is a legal status enabling its founder to influence the entity’s operation only to a limited extent. For example, he may choose members of the foundation’s board, which, however, further makes independent decisions on its own.
rtj/t/kva
