Back off from Budweiser, PM tells Minister for Agriculture
With the ruling centre-right party ODS lurching from scandal to scandal, the Czech Prime Minister Petr Nečas apparently did not want to open another battlefield with brewer Budweiser Budvar. In mid-March 2012 he finally had enough of his Minister for Agriculture’s macho posturing and told him, probably in not so many words, to leave Budweiser Budvar alone.
More specifically, he ordered the Minister, Petr Bendl (ODS), to replace his cronies on the state-owned brewer’s supervisory board with experts and cancel Budweiser Budvar’s controversial audit by HZ Consult (as reported by BRAUWELT International).
The Prime Minister took it upon himself to announce on 14 March 2012 that there will be changes at the brewery. “Yes, there will be a restructuring of Budvar’s supervisory board. It will be smaller and there will be personnel changes, whereby experts close to the National Economic Advisory Council to the Government will be appointed,” Mr Nečas was quoted as saying.
Earlier this year, Mr Bendl appointed his personal advisor, the lawyer Tomáš Jindra, to Budvar’s board. Mr Jindra later acted on the Minister’s behalf when he asked for copies of the brewery’s accounts, which were denied to him by Budějovický Budvar’s director Jiří Boček, it was reported.
Media reports at the time hinted that Mr Bendl was looking for an excuse to sack Mr Boček from the brewery and privatise Budvar – but not before securing a cut for himself and his buddies.
All these plans are off – for the time being at least. But to many people in the Czech Republic, the attempted raid on Budweiser Budvar underlines what their country suffers from: namely politically malleable state agencies, greedy politicians, over-mighty businesses and a culture of impunity (The Economist newspaper).
Incidentally, the week after the PM finally managed to draw a line under the Budweiser affair, the Czech daily MF Dnes published wiretapping records of five-year old phone calls between the then-Prague mayor Pavel Bém (ODS) and the influential lobbyist Roman Janoušek. They discussed, apparently improperly, sales of city and state property and office appointments. The story immediately became a major political scandal, as it revealed the degree of the lobbyist’s informal influence over the Prague City Hall’s decision-making.
The provenance of the tapes has caused a separate scandal. Mf Dnes says the tapes were originally the work of the country’s security service and were leaked to a private company, then owned by a leading politician in another coalition party.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, only days after the wiretapping story had made headlines, Mr Janoušek was in for more trouble following a traffic accident on 23 March 2012. Newspapers reported that he crashed his Porsche into another car and ran over its driver as she tried to stop him from fleeing. They also say he was drunk. Strangely enough, Mr Janousek was not arrested by the police after he was detained in a park, apparently doing a runner.
Looks like the Prime Minister will have his hands full for some time if he wants to clean up his party’s corruption-tainted image. Budweiser Budvar should use this reprieve well.
