Media owned by former Czech PM Babiš publish repugnant article about the state buyout of the industrial pig farm that overlapped the site of the WWII-era concentration camp for Roma at Lety u Písku
[Former Czech PM Andrej] Babiš's employees from the Mladá fronta DNES (MfD) newspaper have published a genuinely, extraordinarily repugnant article trying to make a scandal out of the then-Czech Culture Minister Daniel Herman (Christian Democrats - KDU-ČSL), the then-Czech Human Rights Minister Jan Chvojka (Czech Social Democratic Party - ČSSD), the director of the state-sponsored Museum of Romani Culture Jana Horváthová, and anybody else who allowed the Government of Czech Prime Minister Sobotka (ČSSD) to finally, after decades, buy out the industrial pig farm at Lety in 2017 which overlapped what had once been a concentration camp for Romani people during the Second World War. The article is based on the fact that in 1998, the then-Czech Prime Minister Miloš Zeman had rejected the idea of such a purchase by the state "for a very simple reason, because abolishing the pig farm would have cost the Government and therefore the taxpayers approximately CZK 400 million [EUR 16.8 million] (including the subsequent demolition)."
Babiš’s journalists think it’s a scandal that the state ultimately saw the purchase through, 20 years later, for approximately CZK 400 million. What his editors are chastely omitting is that the ANO party, chaired by Babiš, was in government with the ČSSD and KDU-ČSL at the time.
The authors just point out “by the way” that the then-newly appointed Czech Finance Minister Ivan Pilný (ANO) had a problem with the idea. He had a problem with practically everything, though, because the ministry just fell into his lap in May 2017 after Babiš had been thrown out of the Government, and he considered it a political sacrifice, because somebody from the ANO “movement” had to keep things together until the next elections.
The buyout of the industrial pig farm happened in August, before Pilný was even able to get his bearings. What the subordinates of former PM Babiš are failing to report today is that there were also other ANO ministers, that ANO was the dominant, full-fledged member of the governing coalition, and they fail to mention even in the slightest terms that the entire procedure had been set in motion directly by Babiš, still owner today of their publishing company, and that he did so to clean up his karma after making a scandalous remark of his own about the former concentration camp for Romani people at Lety (“Whoever didn’t work, bam! They were there.”) while he was out shooting the breeze with the locals somewhere, as is his habit.
As a penance for having spoken those unspeakable words, Babiš had promised Herman in September 2016 to find the money for the purchase and see it through, and it was on the basis of that agreement that the entire process of the buyout finally began, and it was known from the start that it actually would not be for that estimated price. In this new article, however, the reporters keep recycling the claim that the private firm was a better negotiator than the state because it received much more money than some appraisal said the property was worth, without reporting that:
– A matter of this kind cannot be subjected to expropriation and the price necessarily had to be a matter of agreement. It is absolutely legitimate that the firm wanted, for example, compensation for its losses, and if that is the price we paid to show that we are not absolute barbarians and that a pig farm should not stand on the site of a former concentration camp for Romani people, then the cost is very much worth it.
– Remunerating the owners for the land and the real estate (the shacks on the farm) does not mean the firm could not then use that money to build something else somewhere else, or use it in another way that would make sense to them, and apparently even a true humanitarian would never have sold it for the sum determined by the expert in the appraisal at issue.
If the state had behaved as “rationally” as the reporters at MfD claim they should have, the industrial pig farm would have remained in place until the end of the world. This article is just a hurtful rant that ignores both the reality of business negotiations and the reality that it was an international, regular human shame that this issue had not been resolved long ago.
All of that basically, probably, just seems natural to them. Babiš’s journalists know all too well why they have written this jumble of unrelated numbers tinged with racism, and they know why they have omitted to report that Babiš, who owns them, started the entire procedure as a penance for his own foul mouth…
