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Senate and municipal elections will be held on October 15 and 16 of this year, the office of the president announced on Friday. Ballots will have to be compiled by August 10. Voters will elect 27 senators, or a third of the upper house, to six-year terms. Local government elections on the other hand affect all relevant bodies; the last such elections in 2006 saw more than 62,000 officials elected in 6365 municipalities. The president’s announcement of the election dates must still be endorsed by Prime Minister Jan Fischer.

President Klaus will not be attending the weekend conference of the Civic Democratic Party, which he founded in 1991 and led for eleven years. Party leader Petr Nečas said that he was not disappointed by the absence and that Mr Klaus had already notified the party that his attendance would be unlikely. The president left a letter for the conference with Mr Nečas and asked that he read it to the assembly in person. Mr Klaus retained the party title of honorary chairman until two years ago, when he gave up his membership because he disagreed with the party’s direction.

The Czech National Bank itself has released the results of tests it carried out that suggest that the Czech banking sector is healthy and resilient against risk. According to the resulting report, the stability of the country’s banking sector should not be jeopardized even by substantially negative economic developments. In the event of such negative developments, certain institutions would suffer losses that could require injections of capital from shareholders. The central bank tested the resilience of the financial sector using three alternative scenarios of future development. The greatest impact on the financial system would be caused by a loss of confidence that would lead to losses of roughly two percent of the entire financial sector – an amount that would require a relatively small injection of 5 billion crowns.

The European Commission has approved the Czech Republic’s plan for film production incentives. The programme allows the state to return up to 20% of the money spent by film productions in the Czech Republic and will be effective until the end of 2015. The scheme is intended to bring back what was a thriving industry until the first half of the decade, and was hurt by similar incentives being introduced in other European countries. In 2004 alone, foreign film production in the Czech Republic declined by 70%