News

The five-star Savoy Westend Hotel in Karlovy Vary owned by sanctioned Russian arms dealer Vladimir Yevtushenkov is operating again, Czech Television reports. According to its findings, the Financial Analysis Office granted an exemption to the hotel on the condition that Yevtushenkov would not make any profits from it. The exemption was negotiated by one of the hotel's managers, Ladislav Špišák, who has done business with many Russian investors in the past, including the sanctioned former mayor of Moscow, Vladimir Resin.

Yevtushenkov is on the Czech sanctions list and has had property seized in the Czech Republic. In Karlovy Vary alone, this amounts to 14 plots of land and six buildings, including the Savoy.

The Savoy, like other hotels in the area, does not officially admit Russian tourists, who have been barred from entering Czechia for the purposes of tourism, sport or culture since last year. However, Czech Television says that the hotel receives mainly Russian-speaking clientele, many of whom have German passports and are therefore able to circumvent the entry ban.

The Christian Democrats want to increase tax breaks for families with three or more children, labour minister and head of the party Marian Jurečka said on Saturday at the party's program conference in Prague. He said that having three or more children is very financially demanding and added that although only ten percent of all families fulfil this criterion, they are responsible for raising 30 percent of all children.

Mr. Jurečka also mentioned balancing work and family life, the availability of housing, solutions to migration and security, and the environment and climate change as topics which the Christian Democrats will be focussing on in the coming months.

The Christian Democrats would prefer to run in the European elections on a joint ticket with the Civic Democrats and TOP 09, i.e. their government coalition partners, Agriculture Minister and Christian Democrat MP Marek Výborný told the Czech News Agency on Saturday. However, they are prepared to run on their own if need be. Discussions between the three parties are still ongoing and a decision should be made by the end of October.

84 percent of Czechs support a proposed ban on individual cages for farmed animals, according to a Eurobarometer survey, with 52 percent of Czechs saying that protecting the welfare of farmed animals is very important and a further 34 percent saying it is somewhat important. This is only slightly less than the European average - across the entire EU, 89 percent of people support the ban on individual cages and a total of 91 percent say it is either very or somewhat important to protect the welfare of farmed animals.

The NGO Compassion in World Farming said in a press release that despite this broad support among the population, the European Commission had failed to deliver promised revisions to EU animal welfare legislation. Back in 2018, citizens from seven European countries, one of which was Czechia, initiated the ‘End the Cage Age’ European Citizens’ Initiative. This was signed by 1.4 million people and secured a commitment by the European Commission to follow through with a revision of current animal welfare legislation, which was supposed to be delivered in September. However, this week, the Commission again failed to deliver the promised proposal when it announced its planned work programme, after failing to meet the September deadline.