Czech Finance Minister Cleared of Aiding Secret Police
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Version 0 of 1. A court in Slovakia on Thursday cleared Andrej Babis, the Czech finance minister, of charges that he had been a Communist-era spy for the secret police in Czechoslovakia. The court in Bratislava said there was no evidence that Mr. Babis had been an agent or that he had knowingly collaborated with the secret police in the 1980s. Czechoslovakia split into Slovakia and the Czech Republic in 1993. Mr. Babis said on Czech television Thursday that he never doubted that he would be cleared. “I have never collaborated with the StB,” he said, using the abbreviation for the deeply reviled secret police. “I was wrongly listed as an agent, and it could not have turned out in any other way because I never signed anything.” Mr. Babis, a billionaire-turned-politician born in what is now Slovakia, sued the Nation’s Memory Institute in Slovakia last year after it claimed that its files showed that he had worked in the 1980s for the secret police. It released previously classified documents that purported to show that Mr. Babis had registered as an informant and became an agent, operating under the code name Bures. The accusation had threatened to destabilize an already shaky coalition government, and it cast a shadow over Mr. Babis, whose antiestablishment party, Ano, or Yes, has become an important force in Czech politics. The issue is no small matter in the Czech Republic, where being listed as a Communist-era spy can result in being denied access to state jobs in the government, academia or the media. The institute vowed to appeal the ruling. |