News

The Czech Republic will fail to meet the EU´s demand for cutting its state budget deficit below 3 percent of GDP by 2013, Finance Minister Eduard Janota said in Thursday’s edition of the daily Lidové noviny. He said the government would have to officially disclose the news to Brussels by the end of January, together with its convergence programme and exit strategy.

EU finance ministers warned the Czech Republic in early December that the country would have to cut its budget gap below 3 percent of GDP by 2013 if it is to be able to adopt the euro in the medium-term horizon. The Czech Republic’s 2009 deficit of 195 billion crowns, four times higher than expected, and its projected 2010 deficit of 163 billion, have thwarted the government’s plans.

Car makers in November 2009 curbed the decline in Czech industrial output to the slowest pace since the country was hit by the global economic crisis a year ago, official data showed Thursday. Output fell by 0.1 percent on a 12-month basis last November, the best figure since September 2008, following a 7.2 percent decline last October, the Czech Statistical Office said.

The Czech Republic is home to car plants run by Volkswagen's unit Škoda Auto, Toyota and Peugeot-Citroen's joint venture TPCA and South Korea's Hyundai. Employment in the industrial sector dropped by 12.5 percent and sales fell by 3.1 percent against a year ago, but the value of new contracts rose by 8.0 percent, mainly owing to car producers, statisticians said.

Czech international Libor Sionko has left FC Copenhagen to return to Sparta Prague, the CTK news agency reported on Thursday. The 32-year-old midfielder, who played for Sparta between 1999-2003, signed a two-and-a-half-year contract with the Prague club. Sionko has played 39 matches for the national team and scored eight goals. Sparta are second in the Czech championship which is in its winter break.

On the third day of hearings against the extreme-right Workers’ Party, chairman Tomáš Vandas told the Supreme Administrative Court he sees nothing wrong with the party’s connections to the right-wing National Democratic Party of Germany. The government, which is currently filing for the dissolution of the Workers’ Party, made the case on Wednesday that the party’s ties to their German counterparts and other, much more radical German extremist associations is evidence of their obstruction of democratic values. Mr Vandas maintains that his party does not espouse neo-Nazism or other fascist ideologies; on Tuesday however he also refused to distance himself from comments made by a speaker at a party event referring to Zionist conspiracy and praising the government of Adolf Hitler. Should the court rule in the government’s favour, the Wokers’ Party would be the first political organisation in the Czech Republic to be banned for the obstruction of democracy.