Prague, April 19 (CTK) – Czech lobbyist Marek Dalik asked for a bribe on behalf of a top representative of the government within the negotiations about the Czech purchase of the Pandur armoured personnel carriers, the Prague Municipal Court wrote in its recent verdict, which is not final as Dalik has appealed it.
In February, the court sentenced him to five years in jail for corruption.
Details from the text of the verdict were released by the servers iHned.cz and lidovky.cz on Tuesday.
In 2007, when the bribe was demanded, the prime minister was Mirek Topolanek (Civic Democrats, ODS), a close acquaintance of Dalik.
The court does not mention any concrete name in its verdict.
It states that at an informal meeting with armament makers in November 2007, Dalik asked for 18 million euros in exchange for Prague buying the Pandurs.
Already when commenting on the verdict in February, judge Veronika Ceplova said Dalik asked for the bribe on the order of someone else and that the “range of the people who might have been involved is quite narrow.”
In the text of the verdict she writes that Dalik evidently did not want the money for himself but for someone who could see to that the Pandur deal goes on.
“Unambiguously, it must have been someone of the top representatives of the government, a person with the status of a public official who could influence the continuation of the Pandur II deal,” the servers write, quoting from the verdict.
For the time being, it remains unclear who from the government might be the person involved, Ceplova writes, but expresses her conviction that Dalik received the instruction from a concrete person.
She writes that the meeting on the technical parameters of the tender for the Pandurs supply was attended by former defence minister Martin Bartak on behalf of the Czech government.
“This shows that if he [Dalik] had been sent to the meeting by someone, he must have had a special instruction to ask for a bribe,” Ceplova writes in the verdict.
In February, the court sentenced Dalik for assisting in bribe taking. Apart from the jail sentence, it imposed a fine of five million crowns on him. If he failed to pay, he would spend another two years in prison.
Dalik pleads not guilty. He has appealed the verdict.
The purchase of Pandurs worth 20.8 billion crowns was approved by the government of Jiri Paroubek (then Social Democrats, CSSD) in 2006. In late 2007, Topolanek’s government withdrew from the deal over a breach of the contractual conditions by the supplier, the Austrian company Steyr. Half a year later, the government approved a new deal, the purchase of 107 Pandurs worth 14.4 billion crowns.
