Prague, July 25 (CTK) – President Milos Zeman, who has slammed Czech judiciary over ordering clients of the bankrupt H-System developer to leave their homes, pretends to have nothing to do with H-System but some of its fraudulently gained money went to Zeman’s Social Democracy (CSSD), Hana Marvanova has tweeted.
Marvanova is a former lawyer of a part of the H-System clients who paid for their flats to H-System in advance, completed them on their own after its collapse in 1997 and whom the Supreme Court (NS) now wants to leave the flats, saying they have never owned them and that the flats must be sold within the bankruptcy proceedings in order to compensate H-System’s all damaged clients.
Marvanova said Zeman’s reaction to the court verdict, in which he challenged the quality and humanity of the Czech judicial system on Tuesday, was “unbelievable.”
Zeman pretends having nothing in common with the case. “However, a part of the money [H-System] fraudulently drew from the clients ended in the CSSD’s coffers at the time when Zeman chaired the party. The connection between the CSSD and H-System boss [Petr] Smetka was Miroslav Slouf, an adviser to the then prime minister Zeman,” Marvanova said.
Zeman was CSSD chairman in 1993-2001 and prime minister in 1998-2002.
Like Marvanova, Prague Municipal Court judge Kamil Kydalka, who previously sentenced Smetka to 12 years in prison for a billion-crown fraud and is well acquainted with the H-System case, said on Wednesday that Zeman seems to have forgotten that his aides were connected with the fraudulent H-system.
“If the president feels serious doubts about the quality of courts, I personally have doubts as to whether the president remembers what role his closest aides played in H-System,” Kydalka has written on social networks.
Zeman’s friend Miroslav Slouf “regularly visited H-System headquarters throughout the year 1996, monthly carrying 24,000 crowns on his departure,” Kydalka wrote.
Zeman’s spokesman Jiri Ovcacek called Kydalka’s words a “mean effort to blacken” the president who is trying to help the dwellers in need.
“Milos Zeman has never had any personal link to the H-System case,” Ovcacek said, accusing Kydalka of lying and thereby committing “a gross offence against his honour as na independent judge.”
Kydalka, otherwise, has sided with the Supreme Court’s (NS) verdict ordering a part of the H-System clients to leave their homes, which stirred a wave of indignation among commentators and politicians and left the afflicted dwellers in despair.
He said the people knew that the flats they were completing on their own and subsequently inhabiting were not theirs but were a part of the estate in bankruptcy. He is sorry about the verdict they face, but they are to blame for it themselves, from the legal point of view, and they should not play surprised now, Kydalka said.
Josef Monsport, the H-System bankruptcy administrator, said the Svatopluk housing cooperative, which associates the afflicted clients, were offered to buy the homes and plots in question within the bankruptcy proceedings for 140 million crowns some time ago.
An expert estimated the price of the eight apartment houses at 230 million, including 90 million the dwellers invested in their completion from their own pockets. The price Svatopluk was asked to cover was thus 140 million, but it offered only 20 million, which the creditor committee unanimously refused to accept, Monsport told CTK.
Based on an agreement Svatopluk struck with PM Andrej Babis this morning, Babis will mediate negotiations between it and Monsport. He plans to organise the first meeting in this respect on Monday. Welcoming Babis’s mediation, Monsport agreed that the negotiations should continue and a solution sought.
