Czech press survey - January 24

The Prague City Hall paid the debt immediately and the scandal ended, he recalls.

Prague authorities should declare that they would not pay the debt. What would have happened? Would the medieval Charles Bridge be sold in an auction? Would the court ban further existence of the Prague City? Steigerwald asks with irony.

The distraint officer should have seized the luxury service car of the clerk who forgot to pay the small sum. Nobody can take seriously the distraint on all Prague´s property, Steigerwald says.

The Prague property distraint shows how unreasonable the Czech distraint business is, Petr Honzejk writes in Hospodarske noviny.

Blocking of one´s property is to motivate a person or institution to pay its debt. This has definitely not been the case, Honzejk indicates.

Czech distraint officers believe that they may do anything they want because the law is on their side. If the law is on their side, then it is a bad law, Honzejk concludes.

Elsewhere in Hospodarske noviny, Jindrich Sidlo says the scandal over the leaked high bonuses for Jana Nagyova, head of Prime Minister Petr Necas´s office, shows that the monthly base pay of the premier´s office head, 33,490 crowns, is ridiculously small.

What monthly salary would be adequate in this very important post? Sidlo asks.

He nevertheless points out that the clerk who leaked the information on Nagyova´s pay only helped fulfil the court´s order that data on the remuneration of senior civil servants should be available to the public.

Sidlo writes that Necas´s statement about "a media lynch of a decent person" was really unfortunate. Many Czech people work as hard as Nagyova but get incomparably lower salaries, he says.

The planned cooperation of Prague students and theatres in an effort to prevent planned university reform bills from being pushed through may seem like a revival of the 1989 Velvet Revolution thanks to which these two freedom-loving groups will alert the nation, Martin Weiss says in Lidove noviny.

But this cooperation may be also described in a different way: as cooperation of two groups who believe that freedom means that the state should give them as much money as possible and let them do whatever they want, Weiss says.

Prague theatres blocked any attempt at cutting the extremely large portion of the culture budget. And Czech universities act in a similar manner now, Weiss writes.

($1=19.736 crowns)

Author: ČTK
www.ctk.cz