Czech press survey - September 17

The police are now doing their utmost and they are uncovering one illegal production capacity after another and say they have progressed to dealers and are aiming at the key perpetrators, Leschtina writes.

But the police should have been eliminating this octopus continuously in "normal times," not during prohibition now, he writes.

They may have found the main culprit already during systematic raids if they had been carrying them out, Leschtina writes.

The term "prohibition" is not correct because the Czech state does not want to eradicate hard alcohol, Tomas Nemecek writes in Lidove noviny.

He writes that the methanol case arouses an epidemic of mistrust. People believe neither producers nor retailers, and if it where not for the ban on the sales of drinks with more than 20 pepcent of alcohol, they would not believe the state that it is doing enough about the tragedy, Nemecek writes.

To comprehend that the Czech Republic has more offices than it needs, one does not need Deputy Prime Minister Karolina Peake (LIDEM) who has prepared material about how it would be possible to reduce bureaucracy and save money, Julie Hrstkova writes in Hospodarske noviny.

She writes that Peake did not mention the most important thing in her report: that the state administration produces on a large scale new laws, regulations and decrees whose main aim is to defend (or even better: found) an office that will require further (redundant) clerks.

Why do Czech politicians suffer from the obsessive need to leave an imprint of their personality in legislation. They even go so far as to push the definition of a pig or a lunch in decrees, Hrstkova writes.

The 16, 20 and may even more billion crowns that Peake says can be saved in the next three years are but a virtual sum. Not that it would not be possible, but no one wants this in fact, Hrstkova writes.

Peake said Prime Minister Petr Necas (ODS) likes her proposal, but he was "visibly" absent from the presentation of her proposals, which quite clearly indicates how the savings in the state administration may end up, Hrstkova writes.

($1=18.659 crowns)

Author: ČTK
www.ctk.cz