Dispute over amnesty authorship may be settled out of court

A drawn-out dispute between lawyer Pavel Hasenkopf and the Office of the President over the authorship of ex-president Václav Klaus’ controversial 2013 amnesty may be settled out-of-court, the ctk news agency reports. Pavel Hasenkopf, who filed a law suit against the president’s office for claiming that he was one of the authors of the amnesty, has accepted an offer to try to reach an out-of-court settlement. He had asked for 7,000,000 crowns in compensation, saying that the claim had damaged his reputation. The amnesty which Vaclav Klaus declared at the end of his second term in office saw the release of over 111,000 prisoners and halted the prosecution of a number of high-profile cases of large-scale corruption and financial fraud.