Prague, Aug 27 (CTK) – The Czech state has been fighting for 240 billion crowns in over 8100 court disputes, daily Lidove noviny (LN) writes Thursday, citing the Office for Government Representation in Property Affairs (UZSVM).
The number of cases has been growing, UZSVM head Katerina Arajmu said.
In 2014, the UZSVM represented the state in 7600 court disputes in some of which it was defending hundreds of millions of crowns or even billions of crowns.
The most difficult case that the office is dealing with is the agenda around the Viktoriagruppe case, LN writes.
The Czech state stored a part of its strategical oil reserves in Germany, but the Viktoriagruppe firm went bankrupt and the insolvency administrator rejected the Czech claim. The Czech state had to take the matter to court, demanding over one billion crowns.
Arajmu said an even much larger dispute concerning a planned motorway construction may start, in which 13 billion U.S. dollars, or about 300 billion crowns, are at stake.
A decision on the authenticity of the documents based on which the huge damage could be claimed has not been made yet, she said.
Arbitrations with business companies over very high sums are only a fraction of the office’s agenda. Most of it are claims for the covering of damage caused by wrong administrative procedures.
But even such a dispute may concern a claim for an enormous compensation, the paper writes, referring to the case of Kurdish doctor Yekta Uzunoglu who spent about 30 months in a custody prison over suspected triple murder, torture and illegal arms dealing in the 1990s and was fully acquitted only in 2007.
In 2008, Uzunoglu received compensation of five million crowns from the Justice Ministry for protracted proceedings. He demands further compensation in several disputes. In total, the sum Uzunoglu claims is about 54 billion crowns, Arajmu said.
