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Slovakia’s Ministry of Interior has ended a long-standing dispute with Czech populist ex-prime minister and current opposition leader Andrej Babis over his communist-era records as a collaborator of Czechoslovakia’s feared internal secret service StB.
As part of the settlement, the ministry acknowledged that Babis did not knowingly cooperate with StB, while the billionaire and Slovak native Babis won’t seek any financial compensation.
The dispute dates back to 2012, when Babis sued Slovakia’s Nation’s Memory Institute (UPN), insisting that he had not collaborated with the secret service and should not have been registered in the files of StB collaborators.
Babis was a member of the communist party and secured elite posts in the 1980s Czechoslovakia, including a posting abroad in Morocco in 1985, but he insisted he was unaware of StB having a file on him and in one of his past statements he claimed he “had no idea how the other, non-economic, StB functions”.
“It lasted 12 years, but in the end truth and justice won,” Babis wrote on his X (formerly Twitter) account, invoking Czechia’s statehood “truth prevails” motto, often used by the country’s first post-communist president and dissident playwright, Václav Havel.
“If we did not succeed in this dispute, Andrej Babis could additionally make high financial claims for damage compensation. This risk was in the context of effective management of public finances unacceptable,” the Ministry’s statement reads.
“Andrej Babis is obliged not to make any claims towards the state,” the ministry’s spokesperson Matej Neumann was quoted as saying by Czech online news outlet Novinky.cz, adding that Babis will take back his complaint at the European Court of Human Rights.
The ministry also said that its decision was based on “two independent external legal analyses drawn up, which confirmed that there is a high risk of losing the legal proceedings in question”.
Earlier this year, Slovakia’s Constitutional Court turned down Babis’s complaint over being listed as an StB collaborator under the codename “Bureš” and upheld previous rulings of lower courts, which dismissed the case.
The news of the settlement were slammed by Slovak liberal journalists. “This decision is political, no court has made it, [nor] any institution after it would examine documents concerning Babis, said Monika Tódová of Slovak daily DenníkN, adding: “the decision has been made by a politician, Minister of Interior Matúš Šutaj Eštok, who is at the same time chairman of Hlas, a friendly party of ANO.”
Tódová also pointed out to Czech Television that UPN found out about the settlement from a press release and that researchers and historians in the field have been examining relevant “documents for decades and their conclusion is that Andrej Babis collaborated with StB”.
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