Czech Finance Minister cleared of being communism-era secret police’s agent

Czech Finance Minister Andris Babis (ANO) was found to have been wrongfully registered as an agent of the former Czechoslovak communist secret police StB by a court in Bratislava, the Czech newswire Ceskenoviny reported June 26.

“I have never collaborated with the StB,” said Babis, as cited by the newswire. “I was wrongly listed as an agent and it could not have turned out in any other was because I never signed anything.”

Babis additionally clarified that as an employee of the Petrimex foreign trade company before 1989 he was contacted by StB’s officer, who, however, at the time showed interest in Petrimex’s business activities only.

Andris Babis, a Slovak-born billionaire who currently serves as the Czech minister of finance, sought to clear his name through the lawsuit he filed against the Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute (UPN) in mid-2013.

According to UPN’s archives, Babis became the STB’s confident in 1980. In 1982 Julius Suman, a StB officer at the time, supposedly won Babis over for cooperation with the StB with code name Bures.

In April 2014 Suman testified in favor of Babis claiming that information about Babis being StB’s agent is untrue and that Babis in fact was never recruited by the communist-era secret police.

The same was later confirmed by another former StB’s officer Andrej Kulha, who testified that Babis’ name in the archives only indicates his unwitting cooperation with the StB. Suman and Kulha both were in charge of Babis’ file in the 1980s.

Although the probability of the StB’s registration being fabricated is very low, the court ruling claimed that it was not proved during the proceedings that Babis indeed had wittingly collaborated with the StB.

The Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute (UPN) vowed to appeal the Bratislava court ruling, which meanwhile, garnered a great deal of criticism in the Slovak media.

Should the accusation of Babis’ possible collaboration with the former communist-era secret police be proven, it could destabilize an already shaky Czech coalition government of Social Democrats (CSSD) and Babis’ party ANO, or Yes.