Prague, Nov 23 (CTK) – The Czech government Social Democrats (CSSD) and Christian Democrats (KDU-CSL) insisted yesterday on their plan to push a closely watched conflict of interest bill through the Chamber of Deputies next week regardless of the negative stance Deputy PM Andrej Babis’s ANO movement has taken on it.
The three parties’ leaders discussed their positions on the controversial bill at a meeting of the Coalition Council yesterday.
Afterwards, CSSD chairman and Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka and KDU-CSL deputy chairman and Agriculture Minister Marian Jurecka said their parties would primarily support the Senate version of the bill that postpones its effect from January to September 2017.
According to behind-the-stage information, ANO failed yesterday to persuade its partners to draft a new bill on the conflict on interests.
Before the meeting, Babis, a chemical, food and media magnate, repeated that he considers the bill anti-constitutional, targeted at him and aimed to oust him from politics.
The crucial problem is that the authors of the bill did not keep their promise that it will not apply to the current ministers, Babis told the media.
The bill, or a draft amendment to the conflict of interest law, restricts the businesses run by ministers.
Its provision that strips companies controlled by ministers of access to public procurement, non-mandatory subsidies and incentives would considerably afflict Babis’s giant Agrofert Holding.
According to a recent analysis the HlidaciPes.org watchdog, Agrofert companies gained public contracts worth 35 billion crowns in the past ten years.
Babis’s ANO entered the Chamber of Deputies in 2013 for the first time and it became a partner in Sobotka’s centre-left cabinet established in early 2014.
The bill’s provision that bans ministers from owning broadcasters and other media will only apply to members of the next government.
The bill, widely dubbed “lex Babis,” made it through the Chamber of Deputies earlier this autumn, also supported by the right-wing opposition. The Senate later returned it to the Chamber together with the proposal that its effect be postponed until September.
The CSSD and the KDU-CSL will support the Senate proposal in the lower house vote next week, but they would back the Chamber of Deputies’ original version, if the Senate proposal failed, Sobotka and Jurecka said after the Coalition Council meeting yesterday.
($1=25.474 crowns)
