Rather than reacting with disgust and concern, citizens of the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Greece and even France and Italy seem to almost delight in discussing the latest one.

A trace of envy can sometimes be sensed among the amateurs at sleaze and influence peddling, as visions fill heads of riding in black limousines, cutting through traffic with a police escort and a miniature Czech flag planted on the fender, smiling at the thought of that offshore account.

Now that's how you cheat and steal. Any idiot can double-charge foreigners for travel services over the Internet. What takes some audacity and style is to rip off the European Union (just another collection of naive, rich foreigners, after all) for millions while building up personal empires. And imagine pulling it off just months after a humiliating dismissal from a job heading the prime minister's office.

There's no denying it: Zdeněk Doležel, the latest Czech manifestation, has his admirers, just as Vladimír Železný still does. Almost certainly one of the latter's fans is Doležel himself. There's always a bigger fish in this game, and the 72 million Kč ($3.2 million) Doležel and friends are accused of scamming out of the EU in castle restoration subsidies looks like small change compared to what some have scored.

Železný, after staging a mutiny as the local broadcast license holder for TV Nova investors Central European Media Enterprises in 1999, found himself in charge of the Czech Republic's richest commercial station, worth over $353 million.

A Stockholm arbitration court ordered the Czech government, and thus its taxpayers, to compensate CME for the loss, Železný's been ousted and the Western investors gained ownership again last May. Yet, Železný remains free and, incredibly, now holds a European Parliament seat representing the Czech Republic.

It's no anomaly. Prague Mayor Pavel Bém, widely favored in the upcoming municipal elections and respected by many for his progressive agenda and integrity as a public official, is now sounding fanfares for a new Formula One racetrack to grace the hinterlands of Prague. No expense is to be spared in this first-class endeavor, which is to include a hotel and hockey arena in the Strašnice district. The price tag has been roughed out (on the back of a cocktail napkin, no doubt) at 2.2 billion Kč.

Bém, no novice at winning public opinion, promises that this project will be entirely financed through private funding sources. The only small hiccup is that the main investor this time, Antonín Charouz, is no deep-pocketed, starry-eyed foreigner. Rather, he's a Czech businessman with a past just as shaky in its way as Doležel's.

Charouz's previous ventures have racked up debts amounting to 5.4 billion Kč. No worries, though. Local taxpayers again rode to the rescue for those in the form of the state bailout agency, Česká konsolidační agentura.

If the Formula One project goes forward (oddly enough including as a partner one of the men who bought Charouz's old debt from the state, Jacques Sicotte), is there really any reason to expect this shaky pre-election scheme to perform any better?