Czech press survey - September 4

It is nevertheless still surprising how long it took the crisis to move from the GDP figures to salaries, Weiss writes.

Until now, the falling incomes were experienced by employees in some sectors and especially the unemployed, he says.

However, it is good to realise that the standard of living in the Czech Republic approximately returned to the level of 2009. And nobody is going to claim that life was extremely bad in the country then, Weiss writes.

It is also good to remind that Germany was known as a country in which real incomes stagnated in the 2000s. In southern Europe, incomes were growing at that time, Weiss notes.

The present difference between Germany and, for example, Greece is obvious, he indicates.

But there may be one problem: the decline becomes a trend, which everybody is reckoning with, Weiss concludes.

The Constitutional Court (US) acts in an impertinent way, Daniel Kaiser writes elsewhere in Lidove noviny, adding that its precedential verdict saying Czech courts may decide on individual property complaints filed by churches and do not have to take into consideration that the law is in the making.

Czech politicians have a big delay in dealing with the restitution claims of the churches, but courts should not press on the lawmakers before the forthcoming vote on the church property return bill, Kaiser says.

If it was not clear enough for somebody, Stanislav Hykys from the Czech Bishops´ Conference clarified the issue, Kaiser writes.

Churches may lodge hundreds of complaints now and the passage of the church restitution bill would prevent this from happening, Kaiser quotes Hykys as telling the Aktualne.cz news server.

Some bad news is actually good, Adam Cerny says in Hospodarske noviny, referring to the Supreme Audit Office´s (NKU) reports on bad management and waste of money in a number of state companies.

As long as it is declared in public what got lost or stolen, one may openly ask what are the police, prosecutors and finally judges doing with such reports, Cerny writes.

The really bad news will come when it will turn out that the MPs have chosen a new NKU head who will guarantee that the controversial cases would not be released, he concludes.

One may congratulate to Health Minister Leos Heger for arriving at the conclusion that a lot of money was stolen within the IZIP project of the electronic health books for patients in the VZP health insurance company, Jiri Leschtina writes elsewhere in Hospodarske noviny.

Heger believes 450 million crowns disappeared, Leschtina recalls.

But he says this is no breakthrough.

A breakthrough would be if the investigation not only led to the fall of VZP director Pavel Horak but also to the destruction of the system due to which tens of billions may be siphoned off the state budget, Leschtina points out.

He says the stealing in the VZP could have not been done without the knowledge of the company´s 30-member administrative board, 20 of whom are politicians, for example the Civic Democrats (ODS) Petr Tluchor and Marek Snajdr.

($1=19.700 crowns)

Author: ČTK
www.ctk.cz