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11/21/2007
The opposition Social Democrats have the support of 34.2 percent of the electorate, suggests a poll conducted by the Factum Invenio agency this month. Second in the survey were the governing Civic Democrats, with 27.9 percent support, followed by the Communists, with 15.3 percent. In terms of seats, the left-wing parties the Social Democrats and the Communists would have 106 between them in the Chamber of Deputies.
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11/21/2007
The Czech Republic has the most bureaucratic tax system in the European Union, suggests a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the World Bank. Of one hundred and seventy-eight states surveyed around the world, the Czech Republic ranked 113th in terms of tax system efficiency and 168th in terms of administrative burden – making it the worst in the EU. Czech firms spend 930 hours a year on tasks related to taxation, the study found.
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11/21/2007
The Czech government has voted to annul a bilateral old-age pensions agreement with Russia. Labour and Social Affairs Minister Petr Necas said the agreement was unsustainable in the long term. Russians with permanent residence can currently apply for a Czech pension, even if they have not paid social insurance in this country. Over 10,000 Russians have permanent residence in the Czech Republic. The issue now has to go before the Czech Parliament.
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11/21/2007
A van containing around 800 kg of silver was stolen from a petrol station near Jihlava on Monday evening, police said. The driver and a passenger left the vehicle at the filling station for half an hour and returned to find it had disappeared. Police said early estimates suggested the van’s cargo was worth around CZK 5 million.
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11/21/2007
The Czech Republic beat Cyprus 2:0 in Nicosia on Wednesday evening, in what was their final European Championship qualifying game. With the Czechs having already reached Euro 2008, coach Karel Bruckner fielded a few relatively inexperienced players, including Slavia Prague’s Daniel Pudil, who opened the scoring after 11 minutes. Jan Koller increased his national record to 51 goals when he netted the Czechs’ second in the middle of the second half.
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11/20/2007
State Attorney, Alif Salichov, has dropped his investigation into Jiri Cunek, the former deputy prime minister. This is the second time in four months that Mr Salichov has called a halt to the investigation. Mr Cunek stood accused of accepting a half-a-million crown bribe when he was mayor of Vsetin in 2002. Charges against him were thrown out by Mr Salichov in August, who said that ‘procedural shortcomings’ had undermined the case. But in November, Supreme State Attorney Renata Vesecka asked Mr Salichov to reopen the investigation, at which point deputy prime minister Jiri Cunek resigned from the government. On Tuesday, Mr Salichov said that he could find no evidence that Mr Cunek had acted in a way that would advantage the man supposed to have bribed him, and thus he could see no reason why Mr Cunek should have received a bribe. In a statement to the press, Mr Cunek said that the State Attorney’s move proved his innocence, which he had been maintaining all along.
On the same day, another State Attorney’s Office dropped a sexual-harassment case being brought against Mr Cunek by his former secretary, Marcela Urbanova. According to a spokesperson, no crime could be proved.
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11/20/2007
In a news conference held on Tuesday, the head of the International Monetary Fund in the Czech Republic, Subhash Thakur, warned that the package of reforms the Czech government voted for in August would not consolidate the country’s finances sufficiently. He said that the reforms would only shore up the country’s finances in the short term, and called for further pension and social benefit reforms. He said that he approved of the move away from direct taxation and towards indirect taxation in the government’s public finance reform package, but called the changes unambitious overall. Despite this, Mr Thakur said that 2007 was proving a very good year for the Czech economy. Growth was strengthened by domestic consumption, and inflation, he said, remained low. According to the IMF, the Czech economy is stable, and remains unblighted by the problems that many of the world’s major economies are currently facing.
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11/20/2007
The health minister, Tomas Julinek, presented a brochure on Tuesday informing Czechs of the fees they can expect to pay on a visit to the doctor as of 2008. The brochure will be published as a supplement to the dailies Mlada Fronta Dnes on Friday and Pravo on Saturday. The guide, which is published by the Health Ministry, outlines the case for healthcare fees in the Czech Republic, and informs Czechs how much they can expect to pay for a visit to the doctor’s or to the emergency room. Healthcare fees were approved as part of the government’s public finance reform bill in August this year. The health minister admits that they were one of the most controversial facets of the reform package, but insisted on Tuesday that they were necessary to ‘prevent waste’ in the healthcare system.
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11/20/2007
On Tuesday, the Czech daily Pravo reported that the search for a new education minister, which has lasted nearly two months, could be over. It reported that the head of the Green Party and stand-in education minister, Martin Bursik, had recommended Jiri Zlatuska for the post. Mr Zlatuska is a Green senator and former head of Brno’s Masaryk University. According to the paper, Mr Zlatuska’s nomination now awaits the approval of PM Mirek Topolanek. It is thought that Mr Topolanek will comment on the issue at his party the Civic Democrats’ conference this weekend in Prague.
Former education minister Dana Kuchtova resigned at the beginning of October having failed to secure billions of crowns’ worth of EU funds which had been earmarked for the Czech Republic. The search for a successor has split the Green Party, with some deputies insisting that she should be reinstated.
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11/20/2007
The Ministry of the Interior announced on Tuesday that there would be a delay in the manufacture and distribution of new passports for Czech citizens including their biometric data. The Czech Republic was supposed to start providing its citizens with passports containing a copy of their fingerprints in May 2008. According to a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior, this has now been postponed until April 2009. The delay has been attributed to prolonged negotiations in the European Parliament about the scheme. Biometric passports are something the European Union would like to see implemented across its member states, but questions of data protection are still being discussed in the European Parliament. Czechs have been able to apply for passports containing an information chip since September 2006, but up until now, this chip has only contained a digital photograph of the passport holder.
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