The corruption case surrounding former Central Bohemian Social Democratic Party (ČSSD) deputy governor David Rath are gradually filing appeals on the basis of which the verdict will later be reviewed by the Supreme Court. Rath, the Kott family, the Metrostav company and the Supreme State Prosecutor Igor Stříž also filed appeals. Jiří Wažik, a spokesman for the Regional Court in Prague, confirmed the information.
The reason for Stříž’s appeal is a partial incorrectness of the legal qualification of two of the accused, according to Petr Malý, a spokesman for the Supreme State Prosecutor’s Office.
The appeal is being accepted by the regional court, which dealt with the case in the first instance. Later, it will forward all the motions, along with the case file, to the Supreme Court in Brno. The final decision at the High Court of Appeal in Prague was handed down last June, but was delivered later.
“The verdict of the High Court was delivered to the convicts on various dates in late December and early January, so the two-month period for filing an appeal has not yet expired, it will happen only in the first week of March. Until then, of course, appeals can be supplemented or filed by other convicts,” Wažik said. He said Martin Jireš, Martin Houdek and Pavel Pilát have also filed appeals so far.
The central trio of the case, as in its first branch, are former Social Democrat governor Rath, former director of the Kladno hospital Kateřina Kottová and her husband Petr Kott. According to the verdict, at the turn of 2011 and 2012, they arranged bribes to manipulate tenders in the Central Bohemian Region for hundreds of millions of crowns. All three received eight-year sentences.
Rath had to return to prison in January, where he had already served part of his original seven-year sentence from the first branch of the case. In the meantime, he was released on parole.
Six other people faced charges, including Pilát, the former CEO of Metrostav. The appeals court found them guilty, and reduced the fines or bans imposed on some of them. The court sent Lucie Novanská and Pavel Drazďanský to prison, while the remaining defendants were sentenced to probation. Metrostav was banned from participating in public tenders for three years.
Source: CTK
