Court confirms that former Czech PM Babiš worked for Soviet secret services

Former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš has lost his latest appeal in Slovakia in a case involving allegations of collaboration with the communist-era secret police in what was then Czechoslovakia, Novinky reported.

Babiš, who was born in what is now Slovakia, sued the Institute of National Remembrance in his country, which has kept his personal file from the Czechoslovakian secret police since 1993, after the country’s division.

According to the Slovak National Memory Institute, in 1982, the secret police recruited Babiš and assigned him the code name “Buresh.” The Czech former prime minister categorically denied this and tried to challenge it in court.

A court in Bratislava dismissed Babiš’s lawsuit back in 2018, but the Slovak Constitutional Court later ordered a retrial, stating that the defendant should not be the Institute of National Remembrance but the Ministry of the Interior of Slovakia.

In 2022, the court of first instance again dismissed Babiš’s lawsuit, and in September 2023, the Supreme Court of Slovakia made a similar decision. The country’s Constitutional Court finally sided with the defendants on February 1, putting the point to rest.

Andrej Babiš is currently in the Czech opposition after his centrist, populist ANO party lost the 2021 elections. He ran for president of the Czech Republic in the January 2023 elections but lost to retired general Petr Pavel.

In a funny case, Babiš and other members of his movement were offended when the Ukrainian publication Texty included them in the list of “Russian world bacteria.”.

The leader of the ANO movement, former Czech prime minister and unsuccessful presidential candidate Andrej Babiš, is taking it hard that he and other members of his movement are on the list of “Russian world bacteria” by the Ukrainian publication Texty.

Babish said that this is vile and disgusting and reiterated that the ANO movement has never been pro-Russian and that it has been on the side of Ukraine since the beginning of the war.

“I and the entire ANO movement have been on the side of Ukraine and have been supporting it since the beginning of the war,” he said.

Texty has included individuals and organizations from 19 European countries that it believes are pro-Russian in a list of approximately 2,100 entities. 136 individuals and organizations represent the Czech Republic.

Earlier, in November, Prague’s highest court overturned the acquittal of former Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš in the case of misuse of EU subsidies, known as the Stork’s Nest case.