The National Sports Agency (NSA) has completed an investigation into how the Czech Tennis Association handled the state subsidy of 65 million for organizing the finals of the Billie Jean King Cup tournament in 2021. Radiojournalist found from the event’s billing that the association hired and paid people for services related to its organization from his management or with ties to him. According to NSA inspectors, however, the tennis association did not break the law when using the subsidy.
Prague
5:00 AM 22 January 2024 Share on Facebook
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The President of the Czech Tennis Association Ivo Kaderka spoke on October 21, 2021 in Prague at a press conference for the final tournament of women’s tennis teams for the Billie Jean King Cup | Photo: Michal Kamaryt | Source: ČTK
“In the controlled areas, no control findings were detected,” NSA Security Director Michal Strnad wrote in official language when asked by Radiožurnál how the control turned out.
Of the other questions sent under the Freedom of Information Act, he responded only that the review was completed last November. The agency refused to answer other questions – what specifically the inspectors were checking and whether they were also interested in who and why the union hired to organize subsidized events.
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Instead of answers, she first turned to the tennis association. She was asking him if he agreed to answer questions about his own control or not. According to Strnad, in order to enable the union to defend its rights and interests.
The union replied to the agency that it does not agree with the provision of information to Radiožurnál. He cited ongoing criminal proceedings as the reason. But it was the tennis association that started it by filing a criminal complaint. Moreover, this does not refer to the control, but to the fact that information about the hiring of people from the union’s leadership and their acquaintances became public.
The National Sports Agency, whose main tasks are to distribute public money to sports and supervise its proper use, first extended the statutory 15-day deadline for processing the request for information to double and finally granted the union. “The agency will not provide the requested information,” Strnad decided.
‘Obstruction and artlessness’
Co-author of the Information Act and adviser on the openness of public administration, Oldřich Kužílek, called the agency’s decision “wrong”. And he sharply criticized her procedure. “The agency’s actions give the impression of a mix of deliberate obstruction, purposeful seeking of delaying practices, and twisting of the law so that information is not provided regardless of legal status. And also lack of artistry, when it can be seen that the processing workers do not know the law,” said Kužílek.
After reviewing the documents, he stated that the NSA should not have even approached the union with a request to provide the requested surveillance information because it did not, he said, limit the union’s rights. And he also considers the rejection of the request to be wrong because, according to him, the answers could not endanger the mentioned criminal proceedings in any way.
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Transparency International lawyer Petra Audová has a similar opinion. According to her, the NSA should have described how specifically the provision of information can frustrate criminal proceedings. “It’s definitely not enough to simply state that there is a criminal proceeding related to the information in question,” says Audová.
Radiožurnál also approached other institutions that examine the handling of public money. And he was investigating whether they also ask the audited subsidy recipients for consent to the publication of information about the audit. The spokeswoman of the National Audit Office (NAO) Hana Kadečková said that the office does nothing of the sort. “According to the Act on the SAO, we are obliged to publish the result of the inspection. Regardless of the wishes of the controlled person,” said Kadečková.
And neither did the Ministry of Education, which was in charge of the distribution of sports subsidies and their control before the creation of the NSA. “The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports has always provided the results of the inspection upon request, and if it was in the internal rules, the inspected person was only informed about the handover to a third party,” said department spokeswoman Aneta Lednová.
Hundreds of thousands for management people
The final tournament of the Billie Jean King Cup was originally supposed to take place in Budapest, but Hungary abandoned it in May 2021 due to the covid-19 pandemic. The Czech Tennis Association then announced that it would organize it. It took place in Prague from November 1 to 6, 2021.
But it was not possible without a subsidy. The head of the association, Ivo Kaderka, calculated the costs of organizing the tournament at 93.3 million when he asked the state for a subsidy of 65 million crowns. The rest was to be covered by other income, for example the revenue from admission fees. Public money therefore made up two thirds of the budget of the entire event.
Radiožurnál therefore found out who the union hired to organize the event. From the invoice that the union itself sent to the NSA, Radiožurnál found that, for example, the vice president of the union, Martin Hynek, received 130,000 for “providing professional services – providing ticketing”, the member of the executive committee of the union, Pavel Saic, received 150,000 for “organizational services”.
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The association paid a quarter of a million to the Star company for the accounting of the tournament. It is chaired by Hana Baierová, who is also the financial director of the Czech Tennis Association. Kaderk’s daughter Sabina Kaderková was in charge of organizing the training sessions for the six-day event. According to the bill, the union paid 90,000 crowns for it. “Yes, I helped with the organization,” confirmed Kaderková. She refused to say more.
Another 1.7 million was obtained by the companies of prominent tennis official Vojtěch Flégl, who is a member of the supervisory board of the association and was the director of the tournament.
The radio journal addressed all the mentioned recipients of the money. None of them answered the questions – what exactly did they do during the organization of the tournament, what did “professional” or “organizational” services mean, why did the association hire them and why did they pay them that much – but none of them answered.
The Radio Journal published its findings last May. In a statement on its website in October, the management of the tennis association confirmed that it had awarded the mentioned people jobs related to the organization of the event, mentioning the finance director, the vice president and the daughter of the president of the association.
“They performed paid activities in the preparation and implementation of the BJK Cup,” the statement said. The head of the union, Ivo Kaderka, and the general secretary, Jakub Fastr, did not respond to Radiožurnál’s questions. Instead of answers, there was only a statement signed by the Czech Tennis Association.
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“Your targeted effort is to damage and scandalize the Czech Tennis Association and specific persons of the CTS management. This targeted and purposeful activity of yours, together with the way you ‘obtain documents’ (in an apparently illegal way), the patterns of your behavior, the instructive way of manipulative so-called ‘asking questions’, etc., leads us to decide not to respond to you and not to communicate with you.” stood in the union’s response.
The control is rather formal
Why the union awarded contracts related to the organization of a subsidized event to people from its own management and its acquaintances remains unclear even after the inspection. During it, however, at the beginning of last year, the then spokesman of the NSA, Jakub Večerka, announced that the agency was investigating more formal requirements and could not tell the unions who they hire.
“What kind of persons or service providers are hired by the organizers of sports events is entirely within their competence, we check as part of the inspection whether the reported and invoiced activity actually took place and is correctly billed. The National Sports Agency does not have any authority to dictate to sports organizations which persons they hire for which activity,” he said.
The National Sports Agency was established in 2019 to make the allocation of subsidies more efficient and transparent. Transparency International analyst Marek Chromý previously told Radiožurnál that the conditions for using the subsidy at BJKC were very loose. “They only say that the union should use state money economically and at prices customary in the place and time,” he said.
Marek Pavlík from the Department of Public Economics of the Faculty of Economics and Administration of Masaryk University pointed out that the sports environment has been non-transparent for a long time. “And this contributes to, let’s say, suboptimal use of subsidies or even corruption. We already have several such cases from football,” he says.
According to Pavlík, it would help if the recipients of subsidies and those who give them publish detailed information about the contributions and their use. “Through transparency and lay public control, there would then be a certain pressure to prevent misuse,” he believes.
Another revision is in progress
However, the National Sports Agency is still examining the further management of the tennis association. Radiožurnál reporters obtained information about the use of state subsidies in 2021 and 2022.
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For example, for the year 2021, the tennis association received a state subsidy of over 140 million crowns from the NSA to support tennis throughout the Czech Republic. Almost a third of all the money, over 41 million, was sent by the association Orel Jednota Praha – Balkan, which was supposed to organize tennis tournaments on their behalf.
The association is controlled by Vojtěch Flégl, he is its mayor, and his relatives and acquaintances also sit in the management. However, Flégl is also a member of the supervisory board of the Czech Tennis Association, the ČTS Council and one of the closest collaborators of the head of the association Kaderka.
Neither Flégl nor Kaderka explained why this association received the money, and they refused to answer Radiožurnál’s questions. At the same time, according to Radiožurnál’s findings, part of the money for organizing the tournaments ended up directly in the accounts of the companies of Flégl and his wife.
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2024-01-22 04:00:00
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