News

Shortly before leaving for Normandy Czech President Vaclav Klaus became one of many heads of state to pay tribute to former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who died at the age of 93 on Saturday. Mr Klaus honoured Mr Reagan's legacy by calling him one of the greatest statesmen of the last era. He added that without Mr Reagan's involvement the fall of Communism in Europe would not have come so swiftly and would not have been as peaceful.

Mr Klaus' predecessor Vaclav Havel also rued the death of the former U.S. president at the weekend.

Six former managers of the collapsed bank IPB have been charged with being responsible for losses of nine billion crowns, the newspaper Mlada fronta Dnes reported on Saturday. The six, who were already facing similar charges, face up to eight years in prison if found guilty. IPB was put under forced administration in the summer of 2000 and was bought by CSOB bank three days later. The state took on IPB's losses at a cost of around 100 billion crowns.

The head of the Senate's foreign affairs committee, Josef Jarab, has expressed disappointment with a statement Chinese deputies made about the Tiananmen Square massacre. In a response to a request from the Czech Senate to outline their position on the event, which took place 15 years ago on Friday, the deputy chairman of the Chinese foreign affairs committee said it had been necessary to clear the square in order to allow normal traffic to resume. Mr Jarab described the statement as evasive and trivialising.

Czech police are questioning a Slovak football referee in connection with a bribery scandal involving the Czech club Synot, the Slovak football association announced on Friday. Several Czech referees and a senior official from Synot have already been arrested over the alleged match-fixing affair, which has been described as the biggest scandal in the history of Czech football. Several Slovak referees officiate in the Czech league.