Prague, June 29 (CTK) – ANO leader Andrej Babis speaks about former president Czech and Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel at another secretly made recording on the anonymous twitter account of the Julius Suman group, which published other Babis’s recordings in the past months, which appeared today.
In the latest recording, Babis speaks about the circumstances of the events in November 1989, when the Communist regime was ousted.
Babis also speaks about Radmila Kleslova, a former ANO senior official, calling her an ambitious woman whom the Communist secret service StB trained for the best spy in the world.
Babis has declined to comment on the recording.
Babis speaks about March 1989, when film director Jiri Svoboda, Communist (KSCM) leader between 1990 and 1993, left for Moscow to lobby for former Czechoslovak Prime Minister Lubomir Strougal.
With the start of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika in the Soviet Union, Strougal sided with the reform efforts in the Communist party, but he lost the power struggle in the party and resigned as premier in October 1988.
“In March 1989, there was a fight among the Communists, they were fighting, they wanted to oust [President Gustav] Husak. This was a fight for his successor, for the transformation,” Babis said, often using vulgar language.
“He (Svoboda) left for Moscow where he met some senior apparatchik and lobbied for Strougal. The Russian guy said: Vaclav Havel. He also said: you have bought him, this is good, this is good…,” Babis said, referring to Kleslova, who was the mayor of the Prague 10 district office until last year.
Babis described Kleslova as an ambitious woman.
“She was in the intelligence service. She was trained for a female spy, the best spy in the world, a blonde woman,” he added.
Kleslova has denied the allegation that she was a spy under the Communist regime and described the recording as manipulated.
“I was never fair-haired and I was never any spy,” she told CTK, adding that the recording was a deliberately cut and manipulated forgery.
Babis was speaking with Marek Pribil, a reporter of the paper Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD), in the recording.
Pribil told the server SeznamZpravy they had met three times. First last September, then at the end of November and last time at the end of last year or the beginning of this year.
Pribil said he wanted to draw up a project of a large book division in Mafra, owned by food and media mogul Babis.
“I wanted to endear myself to Babis,” he added.
“I did not record the meetings at all,” he said, denying that he had made the recordings.
“I believe that the recordings were made via my cell phone,” he added.
In May, Julius Suman published several recordings with Babis.
In them, Babis calls other government members, including Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka (Social Democrats, CSSD), and journalists names, while in the other one, he talked to Pribil about the publication of some articles discrediting the rivals of his ANO movement.
In reaction to this, the Chamber of Deputies adopted a resolution in May saying Babis had publicly lied and abused his media to compromise his political opponents.
In February, former finance minister Babis transferred Agrofert holding, which also includes some media such as MfD, to trustee funds in compliance with an amended law on conflict-of-interest.
