The Czech Justice Ministry should not have accepted a billion-crown bitcoin donation from a convicted drug trafficker, mainly due to the potential threat to public trust in the independent functioning of the judiciary, said outgoing bitcoin case coordinator David Uhlir yesterday in a statement to CTK.
He said he had not uncovered any important facts that were not known from public sources.
Pavel Blazek (ODS) resigned as the justice minister before the summer holidays over the controversial donation.
Last week, Uhlir ended his cooperation with the Justice Ministry earlier than scheduled. In a statement yesterday, he said that during his work for the ministry, he had concluded that Blazek and his colleagues should not have accepted the offer of bitcoin from entrepreneur Tomas Jirikovsky.
“The offer of a significant gift, which depends on a specific decision from a court, should be unacceptable,” Uhlir wrote. “Whoever accepts the gift is not free.”
According to Uhlir, Blazek and his associates should have refused the gift, because accepting it could have endangered public confidence in the independent functioning of the Czech judiciary. He added that other reasons why the ministry should not have accepted the cryptocurrencies were of a “legal-technical nature”. He said he believed they would appear in the audit report commissioned by the ministry.
Uhlir also confirmed in a statement that he would not produce a final report on his findings after his engagement with the ministry ended.
Explaining the premature end of his work as an adviser last week, Justice Minister Eva Decroix (ODS) said Uhlir was ready to write the report after returning from vacation.
Decroix reacted to Uhlir’s statement on social media yesterday, saying she had conveyed the coalition parties’ request for him to write the report. “However, precisely with regard to the independence of the coordinator, I have no political competence to influence his steps and his decisions,” she said. She thanked Uhlir for “his support and help with setting up all the processes”.
Blazek said that Uhlir’s statement and the audit firm’s findings to date have independently confirmed that the conclusion of the donation agreement did not violate any legal regulations. The other statements are just ethical and speculative personal opinions and did not bring anything new, he wrote on social media.
The Grant Thornton external auditing firm also concluded in the first part of a report released last week that the Justice Ministry should not have accepted the billion-crown bitcoin donation, as it was aware of the significant risk that the donation could come from the proceeds of crime. According to the auditor, the office should have taken steps to eliminate the risk before accepting the donation.
Decroix appointed Uhlir as the case coordinator of the bitcoin affair on 19 June.
Yesterday, Uhlir said he had been providing legal services under a verbal agreement since 6 June. He was due to submit his report by the end of August. However, on 28 July, the ministry announced the termination of their cooperation.
According to Decroix, Uhlir has fulfilled his mission and further coordination of the steps would be redundant and wasteful, as it would not bring any new information. The ministry will pay Uhlir CZK 160,000 plus VAT for his services, half of the originally agreed sum.
The minister also initially stated that Uhlir’s report would not be worked out because it would duplicate the legal opinions requested and the commissioned external audit. However, she later said that she had no problem with the report being produced, and that Uhlir was ready to write it.
STAN called on Decroix to complete and publish a written report on the investigation of the case. Deputy Justice Minister Karel Dvorak, a STAN vice chair, said that Uhlir had failed to provide answers for several key questions. STAN MP Hana Naiclerova told Czech Television that Decroix should resign over the lack of a report from Uhlir. She said the developments of the past several days in the bitcoin case were a mockery of public scrutiny.
Decroix said yesterday that all the processes leading to the clarification of the case were underway. “The first part of the audit is published. So are the legal opinions. Please let us not yield to pre-election tug-of-war, and respect that the most important resolution is in the hands of the police,” she said.
The case broke out in late May, when the first information about the bitcoin deal appeared in the media. The cryptocurrency was donated by Jirikovsky, who operated an online marketplace for drug sales and was imprisoned for embezzlement, drug trafficking and illegal weapon trading in 2017. He was released from prison in 2021.
The National Centre against Organised Crime (NCOZ) is investigating the circumstances of the case on suspicion of abuse of power, money laundering and drug trafficking.
