Before the end of his term, Miloš Zeman asked the government twice for abolition. Zeman stated this in an interview published by the daily Mladá fronta Dnes on Thursday. According to Zeman, both requests concerned his chancellor Vratislav Mynář. In the past, Zeman denied that he was seeking abolition. He claims in the interview that he did not lie. According to him, he denied the request for abolition because the media did not specifically ask about abolition for Mynář
The President has the right to grant pardons, amnesties and abolitions. For amnesty and abolition, the co-signature of the prime minister or a member of the cabinet authorized by the prime minister is required. Zeman has now confirmed that he asked the government for abolition. “Yes, twice. Both times it involved Mr. Mynar,” MfD said.
Previously, Zeman denied the requests. “I can responsibly state that I have not asked Prime Minister (Peter) Fiala for any abolition either in the case of the shredding of materials or in the case of the BIS, for the simple reason that, as far as I know, there is no prosecution in these two cases,” he said in January in an interview with Internet television XTV. In the case of abolition, however, the president can also order that prosecution for a certain crime not be initiated.
Currently in the MfD, Zeman said that he previously denied the abolition because the media only asked him about the cases of shredding the report on Russian involvement in the explosions in Vrbětice and the leaks of information from the Security Information Service, but not about the request for abolition in the Mynár case, prosecuted for alleged subsidy under water.
However, Zeman’s current statement does not correspond to the information of the Minister of Justice. In an interview for Seznam Zprávy in March, Blažek also talked about two abolitions, but not only in the Mynár cases. When asked by the server if it was about abolition in the cases of the heads of last year’s branch and the president’s office, the minister said that Zeman was also thinking about solutions of this type. “Mr. President Zeman was convinced that the prosecution of Miloš Balák and Vratislav Mynář would never have been started if they had not worked for him,” Blažek said at the time.
The former head of the Lánská forests, Balák, was punished by the court last year for influencing a two hundred million dollar public contract for securing and draining the slopes in the Lánská obóra around the Klíčava water reservoir. Last March, Zeman granted Balák a pardon. In March of this year, already after Zeman left the post of head of state, Balák was legally convicted in another case, due to the extraction of stone in the Lánská forest. Mynář has been prosecuted since the spring of 2021 due to a six-million subsidy for the completion of a boarding house in Osvětimany in the Uhersko-Hradišť region, which Mynář’s company Clever Management allegedly obtained illegally.
