The Slovak National Memory Institute (ÚPN) presented a newly uncovered StB agent card to the court as evidence of alleged cooperation by Prime Minister Andrej Babiš with the Communist State Security (StB). Today, Babiš again denied association with the secret police of the totalitarian regime. He said the StB kept records without their knowledge. According to the server, Babiš’s lawyer has not yet commented on the new evidence in court.
ÚPN, which manages documents after the StB in Slovakia, discovered in the archive at the end of last year the StB statistical card with Babiš’s data. The card with the stamp “agent” contains the previously mentioned connection name “Bureš” mentioned in connection with Babiš and the names of the governing members of the StB. “The data correlate with the data in the registration protocol, where all types of StB volumes were registered in chronological order, and with the data from the secret collaborator’s volume,” Jerguš Sivoš, the director of the ÚPN office, told the server.
The card states that the StB recruited Babiš to cooperate in November 1982 and that Babiš became an agent voluntarily. According to the card, cooperation between the StB and Babiš was temporarily suspended in June 1988 due to his departure for a working stay in Morocco. Babiš returned only after the end of communist totalitarianism in 1989. “As is well known, The document you are showing here means nothing at all, “Babiš said today when asked by journalists to find the card.
The list of reports was turned to Vojiš’s lawyer, in this case, Vojtech Agner, with a question about the agent card found, but he did not respond to the questions according to the server. The lawyer did not comment on the new evidence even to the regional court in Bratislava, although the court extended the deadline for his opinion until the end of March.
“I never signed. I won the trial three times,” Babiš said today. The Czech Prime Minister initially succeeded in a lawsuit against the ÚPN, in which he demanded a verdict that he was being listed in the StB archives as its agent illegally. However, the Bratislava Regional Court then rejected Babiš’s lawsuit in a renewed trial, and the Slovak Supreme Court upheld the decision. The Slovak Constitutional Court returned the case to the courts the year before last because the courts did not specify exactly who should be the defendant in the dispute.
The Constitutional Court has previously ruled that Babiš cannot sue ÚPN directly. Although the Bratislava court accepted in the subsequent decision that the defendant should not be ÚPN, it did not state who should be the defendant. According to the constitutional judges, this was a mistake repeated by the Supreme Court.