The Slovak Interior Ministry has declared that the Slovak-born former Czech PM Andrej Babis was illegally registered as an agent of the former Czechoslovak Communist secret police (StB) and did not knowingly cooperate with it, the ministry told CTK yesterday. Babis has welcomed the decision.
The office has reached a settlement with Babis in a personality protection dispute, following a lawsuit Babis filed claiming his unauthorised registration in the StB files. The ministry justified the settlement with two legal analyses and the fact that there is a high risk of it losing the case.
The Interior Ministry said that in such a case, Babis could additionally claim high financial compensation. “This risk was unacceptable in the context of efficient management of public finances,” the office wrote.
According to the ministry, the settlement, concluded on the basis of a pair of legal analyses, therefore prevents possible financial losses to the state. “The procedure is fully in line with our efforts to protect Slovakia’s financial interests and prevent unnecessary waste of public funds,” the Interior Ministry wrote.
According to the ministry, Babis pledged not to pursue any claims for damages against Slovakia in connection with his registration as an StB agent, and to withdraw his complaints filed with the European Court of Human Rights.
“I never doubted that I would win the case, which is why I said I would not hesitate to lead a court dispute for the rest of my life,” Babis told CTK in response. “I have never cooperated with the StB, there is not a single piece of evidence that proves otherwise, and that is why I have won the court proceedings four times.”
“I’m glad it’s definitive,” he added. “For twelve years, it was fundamentally damaging to me, abused by my political rivals who insulted me. I don’t expect an apology, they won’t have the courage.”
Babis has been trying for years to get a verdict in Slovak courts that he was wrongly listed as an StB agent in their files. Most recently, courts in Slovakia ruled that Babis should have sued the Slovak Interior Ministry and not the Slovak Institute of Memory of the Nation (UPN), which administers the StB files in Slovakia.
In 2012, Babis sued UPN in accordance with Slovak court practice at the time, but the Constitutional Court broke this rule five years later when it overturned earlier regional and supreme court verdicts in Babis’s favour. However, the Constitutional Court did not specify who the defendant should be in this case.
In 2019, the Constitutional Court overturned yet another decision of the regional court and the Slovak Supreme Court, which dismissed Babis’s previous lawsuit. The relevant court panel chamber justified this on the grounds that the general courts had not determined who the defendant should be in the dispute. It was precisely the resolution of this issue, and not the legitimacy of Babis’s registration in the StB documents themselves, that was the main topic that the Slovak courts then addressed.
The archival documents state that Babis became a StB confidant in 1980, and two years later, he was recruited by StB lieutenant Julius Suman to cooperate with the Communist secret police as an agent under the code name Bures. However, during the hearing of Babis’s lawsuit at the district court, the latter declared that the information was not true and that Babis had not been recruited by the StB.
In a 2017 verdict, the Slovak Constitutional Court questioned the credibility of former StB officers who had testified in Babis’s favour in the municipal courts and whose testimony had been considered crucial at the time.
Meanwhile Czech PM Petr Fiala (ODS) dismissed the Slovak Interior Ministry’s decision as a bargain between the two parties, writing on social media yesterday that Babis had made a deal with friendly Slovak politicians.
The Slovak Interior Ministry is headed by Matus Sutaj Estok, the chair of Hlas-SD, which is part of the Slovak coalition government. In the spring, Babis repeatedly publicly supported Hlas-SD founder Peter Pellegrini in the presidential election.
“The verdict of an independent court has been replaced by an ordinary horse trade,” Fiala said, adding that Babis is trying to bend the facts in his favour. “Today’s announcement of an absolutely unbelievable political agreement on his cooperation with the StB, which he made with friendly politicians in Slovakia, is the latest proof of this.”
According to Czech historian Petr Blazek, director of the Museum of Memory of the 20th Century in Prague, the conclusion of the ministry’s reconciliation with Babis is absolutely exceptional. “It’s not something common,” he told Czech Television. “We have enough evidence to prove that Andrej Babis, as a secret collaborator with the code name Bures, cooperated with one part of the State Security,” Blazek said.
He added that the Interior Ministry’s decision contradicts the information known about Babis’s cooperation with the StB. “We have not only a part of the volume that was kept on Andrej Babis as a secret collaborator of the State Security, but also references to a secret collaborator with the code name Bures in many other volumes,” he added.
