When new managers took over PKN Orlen, the Polish firm that purchased Czech oil and chemical company Unipetrol this summer, they found a strange agreement on their books. It required PKN Orlen to sell some subsidiaries to Czech company Agrofert for 3 billion Kč ($123.6 million), even though the assets carried a total value of 5.3 billion Kč.

The managers cried foul and both a Polish state prosecutor and a Polish parliamentary committee launched investigations into whether the contract offered payback to Agrofert head Andrej Babiš for influence he may have exerted to help PKN Orlen win the tender.

The scandal spun off in a strange and sensational direction Aug. 30 when TV Nova broadcast a covertly recorded video of Zdeněk Doležel, head of the prime minister's office, meeting with Polish lobbyist Jacek Spyra. Doležel, in thinly veiled code, asks for a 5 million Kč payoff, apparently in exchange for a guarantee that a Polish company for which Spyra worked would "get back in the game" should the Unipetrol privatization be voided and reopened to bidding — perhaps because of the Agrofert scandal.

Analysts said the tapes, which seem damning though clouded by vague language and uncertain circumstances, represent the first direct evidence of a bribe solicited by a state official in exchange for support in a privatization.

Meanwhile pressure continues to build for an investigation not only into the Unipetrol privatization but also into who helped TV Nova get a camera into the meeting and why.

The inquiries may take months and could damage political leaders in power at the time — former Prime Minister Stanislav Gross has already launched a campaign distancing himself from the sell-off. What is known now is that allegations surrounding the Unipetrol deal fit a historical pattern in the Czech Republic, and across the former Eastern bloc, of corruption and uncertainty in the privatization process.

After the fall of communism in 1989, the government faced the enormous task of passing the nation's businesses, factories and utilities from public to private hands. To date, the state has closed nearly 6,700 privatizations worth roughly 1 trillion Kč.

The government first privatized state companies through vouchers sold to citizens, which often resulted in asset-stripping and mass layoffs. Millions of citizens bought vouchers and sold them to speculators in what amounted to a freewheeling stock market with nearly no regulation. Most new owners had neither business experience nor capitalization to invest in modernizing often-obsolete infrastructure.

"The owners were like homeless people who inherit large houses," said Václav Žák, Parliament vice chairman from 1990–91. "Since they had no money for coal, they sold rooms and furniture to heat the house."

Žák said selling to foreign companies represented a better solution than vouchers because they had both the capital and expertise to modernize Czech businesses. But, he said, Czechs remained afraid that foreigners would seize the national wealth, making that solution politically unviable.

The state began selling more companies through public tenders in the mid-1990s but a lack of experience and transparency continued to color many of the privatizations. In 1995 Economic Minster Karel Dyba said he would hang himself if Český Telecom wasn't privatized by the end of that year. The telecom giant's privatization closed just last winter after politicians tried to channel a 10 percent commission into their political parties' coffers.

One of the biggest scandals involved the right-leaning Civic Democrats (ODS), whose founder, President Václav Klaus, was then the nation's prime minister. After the Třinec steelworks was privatized in 1996 to former tennis star Milan Šrejbr, investigators discovered 7.5 million Kč in donations to the ODS from a dead Hungarian and a citizen of the east African island of Mauritius. Police traced the money back to Šrejbr, who had borrowed large sums from Czech banks, then under ODS control, to privatize the steelworks.

The banks themselves underwent privatization in the late 1990s, thus politicians no longer controlled who had access to loans. That made privatizations more transparent, Žák said. But corruption persists, according to a consultant who advises foreign companies familiar with government tenders.

During privatizations — which involve several rounds of bidding, dozens of officials, and reams of paperwork — companies must meet a long list of criteria on how investors will finance the deal and run the company before receiving clearance to submit bids.

"There's not much room for corruption in who wins," said the consultant, who requested anonymity. "Everyone can see who the highest bidder is. But it's an open secret in Prague that to qualify [for bidding] you have to give the ruling powers money. Otherwise they say you didn't meet the bidding criteria."

Critics suggest that such corruption could have been at play in the Unipetrol deal. Government leaders have quickly pointed out that the European Union has blessed the privatization as clean. But Babiš has yet to give a good reason why PKN Orlen promised to sell him pieces of Unipetrol at a drastically undervalued rate and Spyra's words that he wanted to get "back into the game" appear consistent with claims that bribes act as an informal entrance fee.

Prime Minister Jiří Paroubek fired Doležel as head of his office, and the government has pressed criminal charges against him and Spyra. But the ruling coalition denies corruption in the original Unipetrol deal and no new rules have appeared for future privatizations.

Of the dozens of large state companies sold since 1990, only five remain: Czech Airlines, Severočeské doly, ČEPRO, ČEZ and MERO.

Though corruption in privatization angers the public, Czech wrongdoing pales in comparison to practices farther east. Privatizations in Russia, which in the early 1990s lacked tax codes, produced men rich enough to buy some of the world's biggest sports clubs in a country where a quarter of the population live below the poverty line.

Žák said privatizations here had indeed been shady, but given political realities and a lack of business experience among Czechs, it remains difficult to say how they could have been brought off more transparently.

"When billions of dollars of property are at stake," he said. "I don't think it can ever be clean."