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This year’s fruit harvest will again be meagre due to spring frosts and heavy rainfall, the Czech Fruit Union said on Tuesday. Although the harvest should increase by 3.8 percent in annual terms, it is 12 percent below the five-year average.

Frosts significantly reduced the harvest of apricots and cherries, especially in Moravia, while apple growers in Bohemia also expect a substantial drop.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš has rejected an account by former US national security adviser John Bolton of their conversation on meeting NATO funding targets as a percentage of GDP.

In Bolton’s new memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” he describes Babiš as having made “the most inept comment” at the 2018 NATO summit in Brussels, complaining that as the economy grew it was difficult to meet the 2% of GDP commitment agreed at the 2014 NATO Summit in Wales.

Babiš said on Tuesday he had in fact argued that percentage of GDP was less important than increasing the absolute amount spent and his words were misunderstood and taken out of context. Babiš said he now understood why President Trump had sacked Bolton if he could not understand such a simple thing. (In fact, Bolton resigned from the post.)

Česká spořitelna CEO Tomáš Salomon has been elected the new Czech Banking Association chairman. He will replace Pavel Kavánek, a former CEO of ČSOB who heads its supervisory board.

Salomon’s three-year term begins on June 24. He said the coronavirus pandemic has shown the importance of profitable and well-capitalized banks that support their clients and the economy in times of crisis.

The lower house is debating a proposed increase in this year's state deficit to 500 billion crowns in view of additional expenditures relating to the coronavirus crisis. It is the third increase in the budget deficit proposed since the start of the pandemic.

In April the Chamber of Deputies agreed to increase the 2020 deficit to 300 billion crowns. Prior to the pandemic, the budget deficit was projected at 40 billion crowns. The government wants the proposal is to be debated by the lower house in a state of legislative emergency. So far the country’s highest state deficit was 192 billion crowns in 2009 due to the global economic recession.

The Communist Party, which tolerates the minority ANO-Social Democrat coalition government, said on Tuesday it plans to negotiate a change in tax rates this autumn, a year before the next elections to the lower house.