Prague, March 29 (CTK) – The ANO party softened its moral code this month, ordering its candidates for elected posts to step down if charges are brought against them, while until now they had to do so if criminal prosecution was launched against them, ANO spokesman told Czech news server Aktualne yesterday.
Under the new code, ANO election candidates will have to give up their candidature and party membership if they are charged with a deliberate crime or with a crime out of negligence related to the performance of their public post.
ANO spokesman Vladimir Vorechovsky told the server that the ANO committee changed the ethical code because criminal prosecution is often halted without any charges being filed and the suspicion of a crime may be unfounded.
ANO deputy chairwoman Jaroslava Pokorna Jermanova said the softening of the code was proposed by the ANO branch in the Usti Region.
“It prevented the candidature of one of our key personalities in this region. People give up their candidatures and then it always turns out that the allegations were groundless,” she said.
Aktualne.cz writes that the two highest representatives of the ANO movement may face criminal prosecution – chairman Andrej Babis, billionaire and finance minister, and the first deputy chairman Jaroslav Faltynek.
Media and other parties criticised controversial transactions that Babis carried out, especially the sale of shares of his firms Profrost and Afeed to the Agrofert chemical, agricultural and food holding, whose sole owner he was. The police have been investigating a rather high subsidy for Babis’s farm Stork Nest.
Faltynek is suspected of a conflict of interests, the European Commission said last week. Faltynek sat on the board of the state agricultural and intervention fund SZIF that supervises the distribution of subsidies, although he also was a board member of the Agrofert holding, which received some of the subsidies.
kva/dr/rtj
