Czech opposition parties led by populist billionaire Andrej Babis' ANO party failed to win support for a  parliamentary session on Prime Minister Petr Fiala's financial affairs on April 11.

“Because corruption, clientelism, money, troughs are the real values which unite [the ruling parties] ODS, TOP 09, STAN, KDU-CSL and Pirates,” Babis said after the expected turning down of the session by the five-party centre-right coalition.

“The opposition has no political arguments, cannot react to our successes, to our repairing of the political amateurism of the previous [Babis] government and its overall inability to run a state,” Fiala responded, recalling Babis’ controversies, including a recent case of Babis’ email in which he instructed his PR team to collect material on the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jan Lipavsky, and his family.  

ANO’s efforts to open a session over Fiala’s involvement in the controversial Podnikatelska druzstevni zalozna (PDZ) financial savings fund were doomed to failure, but they are part of an opposition campaign to keep pressure on the government. Babis’ ANO party has long been on top of the national polls by a wide margin. Babis has relentlessly criticised Fiala’s cabinet as “anti-social” and he has adopted Kremlin-appeasing peace rhetoric over the war in Ukraine.

In February, Fiala described his previously undeclared holding of CZK1mn (€39,433) in PDZ as “a mistake, to which I admitted, and that is where it ends”.

PDZ is suspected of money laundering, according to the reports in the Czech media, and the Czech police and Czech National Bank (CNB) have launched separate probes into PDZ following the reports.

In January, Czech online news outlet Seznam Zpravy (SZ) reported that Fiala was a shareholder in PDZ, as was Fiala’s healthcare advisor Ivan Netuka, who reportedly used PZD to transfer CZK19mn to Switzerland in 2021 and 2022.  

Netuka also appeared in the media last year in connection to the blackmailing scandal at the country’s top health institution, IKEM. Netuka, a physician at IKEM, was supposed to have been blackmailed by his superiors, former IKEM CEO Michal Stiborek and his deputy Jiri Maly. Stiborek and Maly were supposed to have smeared Netuka over his alleged offshore accounts, and both are now facing police investigations. They deny any wrongdoing.

In another strand of the snowballing IKEM case, police records show that Maly was also in touch with a spokesperson of energy and media oligarch Daniel Kretinsky, Daniel Castvaj, to improve the public image of embattled Stiborek by placing articles in Czech News Centre outlets controlled by Kretinsky.   Castvaj denies any wrongdoing.

PDZ is also at the centre of the scandal in which PDZ’s Kamil Bahbouh reportedly facilitated deposit payments amounting to €14mn from Ukraine's defence ministry to Croatian arms dealer Matias Zubak for ammunition deliveries, which never arrived. Former business partners Bahbouh and Zubak have accused each other of fraud concerning the botched PDZ transactions in which Ukraine lost money.  

In one of its February texts about PDZ, SZ wrote that Fiala never properly explained the motivations behind why he chose to become a shareholder in PDZ in 2015 when, in five years, the share officially yielded only CZK256.2.