Prague, Nov 29 (CTK) – The candidate for the post of interior minister in the minority government of ANO is Lubomir Metnar, former deputy interior minister and former head of the security section of the Vitkovice engineering plant, ANO chairman and the nascent cabinet’s head Andrej Babis told iDnes news site on Wednesday.
Metnar, 50, was a police criminal investigator in the Moravia-Silesia Region for many years, dealing with the most serious crimes.
“I decided [to nominate] him based on his long-lasting experience in the sector controlled by the Interior Ministry,” Babis said, referring to Metnar.
Babis submitted his list of 14 ministerial candidates to President Milos Zeman at their meeting on Tuesday. He would not release the candidates’ names, he said, citing the request of Zeman, who wants to meet the nine ministers-newcomers first.
The remaining five seats of ministers will be filled by the ministers who represented ANO in the outgoing coalition cabinet.
In 2010, then interior minister Martin Pecina bestowed a medal on Metnar for helping bring the perpetrators of an arson attack on a Roma family’s house to court. The arsons, whose attack caused heavy burns to a toddler girl, were eventually convicted. Three were sentenced to 22 years in prison and one to 20 years.
In 2011, Metnar became head of the security department of the Vitkovice engineering plant of billionaire Jan Svetlik, who also employed Pecina in the same period.
After Pecina became interior minister in the caretaker cabinet of Jiri Rusnok in 2013, he appointed Metnar his first deputy.
After Milan Chovanec’s (Social Democracy, CSSD) filled the ministerial post in January 2014, Metnar became a deputy minister and he left the ministry later in 2014.
He returned to Svetlik’s Vitkovice. Now, he heads the VTK Special company’s board of directors and is a member of the Vitkovice Heavy Machinery firm’s supervisory board.
According to iDnes, Metnar was until recently a member of the Security, Responsibility and Solidarity (BOS) movement that shows inclination to Russia while criticising the West, the EU and what it calls the aggressive policy of NATO.
