A court refuses to remove former Czech Prime Minister Babis from the list of informants during the Cold War

MADRID, 14 Jun. (EUROPA PRESS) -

A court in Bratislava has thrown down this Tuesday the last attempt of the former Prime Minister of the Czech Republic Andrej Babis (2017-2021) to withdraw his name from a list of informants and collaborators of the StB, the secret service of the communist Czechoslovakia during the War cold.

The court has declared that the National Institute of Memory (UPN), which Babis denounced in 2012, cannot be forced to remove his name from the list of collaborators of the StB, for whom the former prime minister says he has never worked before. knowingly, and leaves such a decision to the Slovak Ministry of the Interior.

Babis, leader of the far-right ANO (Yes, in Czech), collaborated with the Czechoslovak secret services under the code name 'Bures'. After the ruling, he must pay the costs of the trial and reimburse the UPN for its expenses in the process. This is a case that has been going around the Slovak courts since 2012.

The case was returned to this court in Bratislava after the Constitutional Court annulled in November 2018 the rejection verdicts issued by the same regional court in the capital of the Supreme Court, recalls the TASR agency.

The UPN is responsible, among other things, for tracking the documents that were declassified once the countries of the Soviet sphere were stripped of the influence of the USSR with its collapse in 1991. Two years later, Czechoslovakia was divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.