Slovakia's Supreme Court cleared Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babis of cooperation with the former Communist secret police, a spokesman said on Monday, upholding the verdict of a lower court.
Slovakia's Supreme Court cleared Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babis of cooperation with the former Communist secret police, a spokesman said on Monday, upholding the verdict of a lower court.
Babis, a Slovak-born billionaire owner of more than 250 companies, entered government with his ANO movement in 2013 and is favourite to become prime minister after this October's Czech national election.
A Communist party member and official at a state foreign trade firm in the 1980s, he has consistently denied having been an informant.
UPN, Slovakia's investigative institute of Communist-era oppression that brought the prosecution, said it would appeal the verdict at the Constitutional Court.
Babis was initially cleared by a lower court in June 2015, after two former agents of the StB, the secret police of the then Czechoslovakia, testified that Babis was never recruited and his name in the archives only meant unwitting cooperation.
"The court has confirmed what I've been saying from the beginning -- my listing by the StB was unjustifiable, I have never cooperated with the StB," Babis told Czech news agency CTK after the Supreme Court ruling was announced on Monday.
Czechoslovakia broke up peacefully in 1992 and Babis eventually moved to the Czech Republic where he built up his Agrofert chemicals business.
It is the Czech Republic's biggest private employer and has made him the second richest Czech, worth $2.7 billion according to Forbes magazine. Last week, Babis transferred his assets to a trust fund to comply with a new Czech conflict-of-interest law.
Babis, 62, has in the past admitted to meetings with undercover police but said he only discussed issues related to the country's economic interests.
UPN produced files at the 2015 hearing that it maintained showed Babis was an informer towards the end of the Communist era.
Babis is not the only major political figure in the former Soviet bloc to have faced high-profile allegations of cooperation with the Communist-era police.
In Poland, the government-affiliated history institute said last week it had new evidence that Lech Walesa, who led protests and strikes that shook Communist rule in the 1980s, had been a paid informant for the secret police in the 1970s.
Walesa's legal representative said the examination did not amount to scientific evidence and asked to question the assessors. (Reporting By Tatiana Jancarikova; editing by Jan Lopatka and John Stonestreet)
(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)
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