The police detained ČKA board member Radka Kafková July 26 and charged her with bribery. Two other people from outside the agency, former ČKA employee Josef Tykva and entrepreneur Pavel Hrách, both of whom have worked as mediators for the agency in the past, have also been charged in the case.

Irena Válová, spokeswoman for the Supreme State Attorney's Office, said Kafková and the two men allegedly accepted hundreds of thousands of crowns in kickbacks for selling bad loans and liabilities at discounted prices to third parties.

The ČKA manages nonperforming loans and also financial claims that were transferred to it during the restructuring of Czech banks and many other state-owned companies in the 1990s. The ČKA is slated to close down at the end of 2007.

The police raided Kafková's house shortly after Tykva visited her on July 26, and discovered an unspecified amount of money in a car in the garage.

The police said the money seized in Kafková's garage was part of a bribe she was to receive for insider trading in relation to the ČKA's sale of a 3 billion Kč ($133 million) claim it received from the Cetus company after the bankruptcy of IPB Bank in June 2000. Cetus was a debtor of the bank at the time.

The ČKA sold the claim to Arrwrise of Britain in June for approximately 560 million Kč.

Two days after detaining Kafková, the police announced they had seized 420 million Kč in accounts that belonged to Cetus.

Zdeněk Čáp, general director of the ČKA, said the agency's internal audit department is reviewing all the transfers Kafková was involved in. He insisted, however, that the investigation is " a failure of an individual, not the entire system."

This is not the only controversy ČKA has faced this year.

In early May, the agency lost about 500 million Kč from its accounts. The money had been sent by a ČKA subsidiary to a bank in Switzerland for appreciation.