News

President Vaclav Klaus has appointed judge Vlasta Formankova to the Constitutional Court, after the Senate approved her nomination by a slight majority on Thursday. However, critics say she should not have been appointed, after it emerged that during the communist era she sentenced a pub manager to prison for ten months for insulting party members. Ms Formankova now says she was young at the time she handed down the verdict, which she describes as a mistake.

There has been a huge increase in the number of Czechs taking out mortgages, thanks to low interest rates and concerted advertising campaigns, Lidove noviny reported on Friday. All of the country's major banks have recorded significant increases in the number of mortgages they have sold, with CSOB bank, for instance, recording a rise of 106 percent.

Meanwhile, foreign real estate funds invested over 600 million US dollars in property in the Czech Republic in the first half of 2005, a year-on-year increase of 75 percent, Hospodarske noviny reported.

A special investigatory team of police has begun looking into the police force's recent action to shut down CzechTek, an annual techno party that convened this year in western Bohemia. A police spokesperson said on Thursday that the team was asking both the media and the general public to submit any video recordings, photographs or other relevant documentation of the CzechTek event to the police, in order to aid the team in its work. The formation of the police investigatory team comes on the heels of a Wednesday meeting of the Senate's Defence and Security Committee at which members said the police had been too heavy handed in breaking up the techno party.

Several hundred people, mostly trade unionists, demonstrated in the Romanian city of Iasi on Thursday to demand the extradition of a Czech businessman who fled the country last week to avoid going to prison for incitement to murder. Frantisek Priplata was convicted in June of provoking the murder of a Romanian trade unionist who had been fighting to cancel a contract that Mr Priplata had secured for his employer to buy into a Romanian steelworks. He was to begin an eight-year prison sentence in Romania next month, but escaped to the Czech Republic on Friday. Mr Priplata claims he was not given a fair trial and the Czech foreign ministry has said he will not be extradited. Romania, however, is expected to issue an international warrant for Mr Priplata's arrest and to push for his return.