The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has dismissed the Justice Ministry's explanations of logistical problems, saying that no country has ever halted such an inspection.

Instead, say insiders, OECD watchdogs suspect the Czech side pulled the plug on the visit scheduled for Oct. 10–14 because it feared anti-bribery investigators would produce a critical report.

The inspectors' visit would have come after a flurry of corruption scandals and in the wake of a survey that concluded the Czech Republic has one of the highest levels of corruption in the European Union. It would also have meant inspectors arriving just weeks after the controversial sacking of Supreme State Attorney Marie Benesová.

"In this climate, I think suddenly somebody realized that receiving a team of experts would have given quite bad results in terms of the evaluation," an OECD source told The Prague Post.

'Unexpected problems'

The Justice Ministry denies that the country has anything to hide.

Ministry spokesman Petr Dimun explained, without offering any more specifics, "The visit was postponed due to unexpected problems on the Czech side, as it was not possible to confirm the presence of certain national institutions on a scale required by the OECD, the presence of which would have played an important role."

A seven-member Working Group on Bribery was to travel to Prague for a routine inspection to assess whether the country is enforcing rules it has agreed to as an OECD member.

The regulations are designed to clamp down on instances of multinational firms and other business interests bribing foreign public officials.

But the government announced to the OECD that the inspection was cancelled Oct. 7.

"This was the first time that such an outside visit was canceled — just one working day before it should have taken place," said Patrick Moulette, head of the anticorruption division of the OECD.

"This was really surprising and triggered serious concern in the working group," Moulette added.

Benešová was sacked as supreme state attorney, the country's top law-enforcement official, Sept. 29, after a high-profile public dispute with Justice Minister Pavel Němec.

Benešová then claimed that Němec fired her out of fear of what she might uncover while investigating claims of wrongdoing in his ministry — a charge the ministry has denied.

Benešová raised eyebrows during her tenure by publicly saying that graft is endemic in the government and in other state institutions.

Critics of the Social Democrat-led administration say her fears have been borne out by a series of scandals, such as the resignation of Stanislav Gross as prime minister in April amid unanswered questions over where he got the money to pay for a luxury Prague apartment.

In August Gross's successor, Jiří Paroubek, fired the head of his Cabinet office amid allegations that government leaders accepted kickbacks related to the privatization of oil and chemical company Unipetrol.

Conflicting interests

Meanwhile, years of efforts to push through a comprehensive conflict-of-interest bill, a measure that aims to force public officials to declare their assets every year and impose sanctions for those who fail to do so, have still not borne fruit.

A conflict-of-interest bill is currently being examined by deputy committees as it makes its way through Parliament amid constant revision.

The OECD antibribery inspectors wrote to Němec saying that the cancellation of their visit is inconsistent with the Czech Republic's international obligations, and that rescheduling the assessment will affect the OECD's timetable in inspecting other countries, according to Moulette.

Justice Ministry spokesman Dimun insisted the OECD inspection was not canceled but postponed, despite the fact that no new date has been fixed.

OECD experts now want to come early next year.

Dimun said that deferring the inspection does not breach Czech commitments to the international community: "The fact that on this single occasion the visit has been postponed cannot be seen as the Czech Republic's lack of political will to cooperate but, on the contrary, as a sign of its responsible attitude toward the whole issue.

"From all this," he said, "you can see that it makes absolutely no sense to speculate that the Czech Republic would have any unspecified facts to hide."

However, Michal Štička, from the Czech branch of anticorruption watchdog Transparency International, said the cancellation of the OECD visit sent "a very bad signal. No explanation will be good enough.

"This shows how high on the agenda corruption is for the justice minister in particular and for the Czech government in general: not very high," Štička said.

A Transparency International report released Oct. 18 found that this country has one of the highest levels of corruption in the EU, with only Poland and Latvia faring worse.