Former StB agent’s fraud sentence lengthened to six years

Former StB agent Pavel Minařík had his sentence for fraud increased from 4.5 to six years by the High Court in Olomouc on Tuesday. Mr Minařík gained notoriety in the 1970s, when it was revealed that he was a Czech communist spy at the US-funded Radio Free Europe headquarters in Munich. He was sentenced to a jail term in March of this year after being found guilty of defrauding insurance company Kooperativa to the tune of tens of millions of crowns. In 1996, Mr Minařík claimed insurance on a load of fibreoptics he was delivering to Ukraine which were destroyed en route by fire. It later turned out that Mr Minařík had been behind the fire himself, and overvalued the cargo deliberately. On Tuesday, the High Court in Olomouc lengthened his sentence and ordered the former secret agent to start serving his prison term with immediate effect.