PRAGUE — Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš is fending off new corruption allegations just days before voters head to the polls, trying to reframe the revelations as a fight with local journalists.
Babiš on Sunday was implicated in the so-called Pandora Papers, a massive leak of documents that exposed how the rich and powerful use offshore companies to hide their wealth. According to the documents, the Czech leader failed to disclose a series of shell companies used to buy a multi-million euro French chateau.
In an election debate Sunday night on CNN Prima, Babiš brushed off the revelations, indicating it merely showed he had “bought some real estate in 2009.” And he went after the media for publishing the data, declaring that a local “mafia” of journalists was attempting to scuttle his reelection days before the Czech parliamentary elections on October 8 and 9.
Babiš specifically appeared to suggest — without offering evidence — that the force behind the Pandora Papers was Czech entrepreneur Zdeněk Bakala, head of the Economia publishing house, which owns the fiercely anti-Babiš weekly magazine Respekt, among other publications.
The attack was part of a broader spat Babiš has been waging with Respekt. At a recent election campaign stop, the Czech leader refused to let two journalists from the publication cover the event.
Babiš is facing a difficult reelection, with the most recent poll showing his ANO movement with a small lead over two opposition coalitions and falling well short of its results from 2017. The poll, from the Kantar research agency, also showed Babiš’s coalition partners, the Social Democrats, below the 5 percent threshold required to make it into the lower house of the Czech parliament.
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If that result is confirmed in the election, it will leave the prime minister scrambling to find another political arrangement to remain in office. Babiš currently heads a minority coalition government that receives the tacit support of the Communist Party in most parliamentary votes.
On Sunday night, Babiš’s political opponents were quick to exploit the Pandora Papers revelations. In the CNN Prima debate, Petr Fiala, the head of the center-right SPOLU coalition, called on Babiš “to explain if he used untaxed money and how it worked. The prime minister fights against tax havens and then uses them.”
“He preaches water and drinks French wine,” said Ivan Bartoš, the head of the Pirates/STAN coalition.
Details from the Pandora Papers were published on Sunday by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in collaboration with a number of major media outlets.
According to the published data, in 2009 Babiš “injected $22 million [€19 million] into a string of shell companies to buy a sprawling property, known as Chateau Bigaud,” in a hilltop village on the French Riviera near the city of Cannes.
“In 2018,” the documents added, “a real estate conglomerate indirectly owned by Babiš quietly bought the Monaco company that owned the chateau.”
Property buyers sometimes have legitimate reasons to use offshore companies for purchases, such as security or privacy. It is not illegal to do so. However, ICIJ added that Babiš “has not disclosed the shell companies and the chateau in the asset declarations he’s required to file as a public official.”
Kamil Kouba, a former anti-corruption police official and money laundering specialist, told Investigace.cz — ICIJ’s Czech partner on the project — that Babiš likely used the scheme to launder money.
“If you need to use offshore for one of the legitimate reasons, you won’t create anything so complicated,” he said.
Milan Eibl, the chief analyst of the Czech chapter of Transparency International, agreed, telling the online daily Deník N that the prime minister “used proven steps to cover up the origin of money.”
Babiš denied he had done anything wrong or illegal and said that the revelations were targeting his reelection campaign.
“I was waiting for what they would pull on me just before the elections so that they would harm me and influence the Czech elections,” he said. “This time [it is] a 12-year-old case. Before I entered politics.”
The Czech National Police on Monday said the National Center against Organized Crime will investigate the leaked information, “not only with regard to the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, but also all citizens of the Czech Republic.”
Some 300 other Czech citizens are also named in the data.
Source: Politico
