Black souls and a job for the director’s son. How, according to the shelf, orders in the Olomouc museum were bent | iRADIO

• Radiožurnál obtained police documents that describe the “bending” of orders at the Museum of History in Olomouc.
• The police charged three men in the case – the former director of the museum Břetislav Holásk, his long-time acquaintance and former Olomouc councilor Miroslav Petřík, and also businessman Jiří Křeháček, whose company was supposed to select contractors for the museum.
• According to the police, the men arranged for the contract to shoot promotional spots for the museum to be won by a fake winner. For another project financed by European money, they hired people who were paid, although they did not do any work.
• Former director Holásek of Radiožurnál said that he cannot comment on the case at the moment. Even businessman Křeháček did not want to comment on the case. Former councilor Petřík did not respond to questions.

Olomouc
5:00 a.m November 9, 2023

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For more than a decade, Břetislav Holásek was one of the important behind-the-scenes players in Olomouc’s municipal politics.

In 2010, the former successful businessman became the head of the National History Museum in Olomouc, which falls under the Olomouc region. It was at events organized by the museum that he managed to connect important people in the city.

Holásk’s very good friend and ally was the social democrat Miroslav Petřík – the long-time director of Olomouc Technical Services, also an Olomouc councilor between 2014 and 2018 and, among other things, another gray eminence of local politics. In 2018, Petřík disappeared overnight and a search was announced for him. The police eventually found him in an Austrian boarding house after a few days. He explained his disappearance with personal problems.

As a result of this episode, Petřík lost all his functions. A few months later, Holásek brings Petřík to the National History Museum. He is supposed to help him with the preparation of a contract for 66 million crowns for the digitization of museum collections.

In May of this year, the two men, together with Kroměříž businessman Josef Křeháček, were accused by detectives of the National Central Office against Organized Crime (NCOZ) of “bending” of public contracts and subsidy fraud precisely in connection with the project of digitization of collections.

This is confirmed by the documents that Radiožurnál has now obtained on the case. The editors have already drawn attention to the fact that the police seized the real estate of the three men in May this year. According to the police, the trio caused damage worth 14 million crowns.

Stick figure

The documents that Radiožurnál studied describe what exactly the detectives accuse the man of. Part of the case concerns a contract to shoot several educational spots about the history of Olomouc. It was listed by the museum under the leadership of Holásek at the end of 2020.

The best offer was submitted by Jakub Šťastný, 885 thousand. However, as it follows from the findings of the detectives, from the beginning Holásek and Petřík directed the entire tender in such a way that it would turn out exactly according to their ideas – that is, that it was Šťastný who would win.

According to the detectives, Šťastný was only a fake character. In reality, Holáská’s son Radan took care of the order. None of the Holásks wanted to comment on the Radiožurnál case. Břetislav Holásek ended up at the head of the museum in 2021, not long after detectives raided it in connection with the case.

“I can’t comment on that, it’s an ongoing live case. It’s annoying, I was the director at the time, nothing can be done. I can’t say more about it now,” he told Radiožurnál. He then responded briefly to questions about his son’s role in the whole case. “No, it doesn’t concern the son at all, it was marginally there,” he claims.

His son Radan expressed himself similarly. “I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t say anything about it now. This is being investigated by the police and I have signed a non-disclosure agreement. I wouldn’t even have anything to say to you about it, because I don’t figure in it at all,” Radan Holásek, who was not actually accused in the case, told Radiožurnál.

However, it appears from police documents that the detectives were closely monitoring the events in the museum. They continuously bugged the group’s cell phones and also installed “ears” in Holásk’s director’s office. They were therefore able to catch director Holásek talking about his son’s role in the case: “…it must have been a fatal mistake that you somehow got it, we checked it, for example, with those films, that I didn’t write it to my son’s company, but I wrote it’s just completely…”

And the detectives also caught another of Holásk’s sentences: “Yes, between the four eyes, yes, that Kuba Šťastný is just stuck there so that someone can figure it out…”

It is possible to read from the conclusions of the investigation that the people around Holásek were really in control of the job from start to finish. According to the detectives, the accused Petřík prepared the complete materials for the order for Šťastný, as well as for the other company, which, according to the police, only registered as “shrubs”. This is evidenced, among other things, by the tender documents that the police found at Petřík’s house during subsequent house searches.

Radiožurnál tried repeatedly to reach Petřík at home, but without success. After several days, he did not respond to a request for a statement sent to his e-mail box and via the LinkedIn social network, through which Petřík had communicated with the reporter in the past.

Black souls

Anti-corruption detectives, while investigating the events at the Museum of National History, came across other strange and, from their point of view, illegal practices. They concern the hiring of people for educational projects paid for with European money.

The police investigation shows that the accused businessman Křeháček, together with Holásek and Petřík, employed 14 people in the educational project, who received money but did not actually do any work. According to the detectives, one of them was, for example, Martin Nevyjel, the former editor-in-chief of the Olomouc newspaper and subsequently a manager in various positions within the media group Vltava Labe Media.

The detectives state that Nevyjel was employed as a language proofreader in the project and was supposed to be in charge of editing the texts within the project. However, when the police asked him to submit the results of this work, he was unable to document them.

“Yes, I wasn’t able to substantiate them,” he told Radiožurnál now. At the same time, he claims that he performed the assigned editorial work for the museum. “We worked together on some timepiece. I did a magazine composition and stuff like that. It was my private matter that the director asked me to do,” said Nevyjel.

The police also describe the case of another man who received money from the museum despite not doing any work. The man therefore decided to withdraw from the project and return the money to the museum. It must be added that the police did not charge any of the 14 “black souls” in the case.

In the beginning there was a bribe

From the documents that Radiožurnál has at its disposal, it is possible to read why the anti-corruption detectives focused on the events in the National History Museum. At the beginning of the case, there was a request for a bribe of 750 thousand crowns. According to the police, Křeháček should have asked the manager of one of the companies that were supposed to work on digitizing the collections for the museum about the money.

The police described that the money for the bribe was supposed to come from the budget of the contract and the company was then supposed to extract it using fictitious invoices issued for another company for the administrative security of the contract, control of the budget and schedule.

Radiožurnál also tried to get the reaction of the accused Křeháček, who took care of the contract for the museum. However, he could not find him in the office of his company KM Admin. Křeháček did not even respond to phone calls or text messages. Finally, he responded to the emailed questions: “Don’t be angry, but I won’t comment on the matter in question.”

Jakub Mikel

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