The impact of the tennis case: politicians demand more thorough checks | iRADIO

• Deputies and senators from the supervisory commission of the National Sports Agency (NSA) demand that the agency more thoroughly control the sports organizations to which it pays subsidies.
• They also want the NSA to hire more inspectors and target “risky” unions. They are reacting to the subsidy case in the Czech Tennis Association.
• Suspicious financial transactions of the tennis association were hidden for a long time, only Radiožurnál revealed them.
• The union is now looking for a way to pay the penalty of almost 30 million. Its president Ivo Kaderka is accused of fraud and ended up in custody, but refuses to resign.

Prague
5:00 a.m March 27, 2024

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“The control mechanisms are not set up correctly, if it was that obvious i for layman,” he says member of the Supervisory Board of the National Sports Agency (NSA) Andrea Hoffmannová from the Pirate Party. She reacted to the fact that the NSA inspectors themselves did not notice suspicious financial transactions in the Czech Tennis Association. Radiožurnál revealed them already in 2022, the agency launched a detailed review of the union’s finances until the notice of reporters.

Six inspectors work at the Subsidy Control Department of the National Sports Agency, which pays out around six billion crowns to sports every year, and they distribute around a hundred inspections between them each year. Most of the checks are rather formal, the NSA mainly checks whether public money went to the right accounts and whether the recipient has correct invoices.

According to the interviewed members of the NSA supervisory commission, this should change. “On the basis of recent events, the quality of inspection activities and the frequency of inspections will be improved,” promises the senator for STAN Jan Sobotka.

Increase the number of controllers

“There are very few inspectors in the NSA. At the last meeting of the supervisory commission, we therefore called for personnel reinforcement in the area of ​​control in order to reduce the risk, because if you check it more often, it turns out that the errors are there,” says vice-chairman of the NSA supervisory commission Arnošt Štěpánek from the Pirate Party. “The increase in table places will be discussed with the government,” adds Sobotka.

Members of the commission are talking about hiring two or three new controllers, but NSA chairman Ondřej Šebek from ODS talked about one at an internal NSA meeting.

“One person is better than nothing, on the other hand, two or three would solve more. We want to propose a range between one and three civil servants, but we are in the grip of the state spending apparatus, where the trend of increasing civil servants is not generally acceptable. But here we will argue the seriousness of the situation,” promises Šebek.

If the government does not allow him three new controllers, he wants to redistribute the duties of the current employees. But this is only an extreme solution, because then, according to the head of the NSA, there would be a risk that employees would be absent elsewhere and, for example, the payment of subsidies could be delayed. But Šebek claims that he would have asked for reinforcements even without the “tennis case”.

The supervisory commission also ordered him to check “risky” unions more often. “That was our initiative when situations like the one with the tennis association happen, so that it doesn’t end with one check. On the contrary, it should be selected which applications for subsidies may be risky, and these should be checked in the following years to make sure that the mechanisms that failed there do not continue to fail,” says another member of the NSA supervisory commission, ANO senator Miroslav Adámek .

“The supervisory commission tasked the chairman to increase the control activity of entities that have been found to have committed irregularities in the drawing of subsidies in the past. Repeat checks were imposed on these subsidy recipients,” Sobotka adds.

“We will certainly fulfill it, it is a logical request of the supervisory board,” Šebek responds.

The cases were revealed by Radiožurnál

The tennis case was revealed by Radiožurnál as early as 2022, when it obtained an account of the subsidy of 141 million crowns, which the tennis association received from the NSA for the previous year. He discovered that almost a third of the money (over 41 million crowns) was then sent by the union to Orel Jednota Praha – Balkan to organize tournaments on their behalf.

The association is controlled by Vojtěch Flégl, an influential tennis official, a member of the association’s supervisory board and one of the closest collaborators of the association’s president, Ivo Kaderka. For individual services at tournaments, Flégl’s association hired companies, which again belonged to Flégl or his wife.

In addition, Radiožurnál discovered that these companies had public money reimbursed by the union for services that they did not actually perform at all.

Based on Radiožurnál’s findings, the then chairman of the NSA, Filip Neusser, ordered in November 2022 an extraordinary audit of the association’s finances for 2021.

In February of this year, the audit of the accounts ended and the auditors ordered the union to pay a penalty of 29.7 million crowns. However, according to information from Radiožurnál, the tennis association gave public money to Flégl’s association even before 2021, without NSA she found out.

Another example that Radiožurnál drew attention to concerned the illegal way in which the rowing union bought 39 racing boats for around 18 million crowns between 2019 and 2021. He paid most of it with public money.

According to Radiožurnál’s findings, he set up the tender process in such a way that only an intermediary who supplied all the boats of different brands at once could win the contract. Each time, only the association’s subsidiary company Sportcentrum Račice applied, it first bought the boats itself, added a commission and then resold them to the association with a markup.

If the union allowed ship suppliers to participate directly in the competition, it would save about ten percent of the contract price.

When Radiožurnál drew attention to this in 2022, the NSA ordered an inspection and finally imposed a sanction of roughly two million crowns on the union. Initially, the rowers got away with it, and even then the inspectors did not notice anything suspicious. How is it possible? NSA Chairman Šebek explains this by saying that there are many recipients of subsidies and the agency selects only a few for inspection.

Report suspicions

Member of the supervisory board of the NSA, senator from the KDU-ČSL Josef Klement adds to this:Regarding the sufficiency of control mechanisms, it must be stated that it is difficult to trace transfers within the union.”

The deputy chairman of the NSA supervisory commission, Arnošt Štěpánek, speaks similarly. “Usually, in those thousands of pages, you don’t have a chance to find the loophole where the money is going. Moreover, these structures are mostly surrounded by the influence that everyone is afraid to say anything, because some are comfortable with it and others are afraid that if they say something, they will be cut off from the little they get, they will not be given the tournaments, youth support, they will be starved, so he prefers to keep quiet,” he describes. It therefore bets on information directly from the sports environment.

“The only chance you have is if someone tells you that something is wrong here,” he adds. And that is exactly what he wants to focus on, according to his words. “I’m going to campaign for people who feel there’s something wrong with the funding of a sport, association or club to let us know. It’s not bonzacism, it’s in the interest of all of us that the money in sports goes where it belongs,” he adds.

NSA chairman Ondřej Šebek agrees. “The supervisory commission was created precisely to deal with the stimuli.”

Open data and public registry

In addition, Štěpánek requests that the NSA discloses to the last crown, to whom and for what it sends public money. “Every person should see how much money went to whom,” he thinks.

“We want a complete overview of who, where, what they asked for and how much they got. And to make it publicly available in open data, not in some mushy database. Just a set of data where there will be recipients of subsidies according to ID number, club, size, everything, one big table, and anyone who lists it according to filters can work with it. That’s our huge goal, why we went to the NSA as Pirates,” he describes, adding that public control works primarily as prevention.

“When everyone has access to this data, no one will allow themselves to manipulate subsidies,” hopes Štěpánek.

“I don’t know that we would do it in such detail. It’s a matter of discussion, it’s not like that yet,” comments NSA chief Šebek.

The publicly accessible register of athletes, which the Pirates promote, is also related to the open database.

“I work in the city and region in the sports commission,” says Štěpánek from Hradec Králové, who works as the deputy governor of Hradec Králové.

“We distribute money to represent the region, and you don’t have a chance to see how many representatives there are, or even how many active athletes there are. The clubs write us some numbers, then we put them side by side with the city, region and NSA, and we have three different numbers for one club. They report different numbers to different organizations,” he describes the current practice.

The Supervisory Commission will continue to deal with the functioning of the NSA. “We will hold a discussion on the personnel capacities of the NSA and the setting of the system for more detailed tracing at the supervisory committee, with an effort to eliminate possible errors on the part of the applicants as much as possible,” explains the member of the committee Senator Klement.

The union lost its main sponsor

A 30-day deadline for the Czech Tennis Association to pay a fine of 29.7 million crowns has been running since mid-March. But he doesn’t have that much money. “We found only 2.7 million in the cash register,” says one of the members of the union’s management on condition of anonymity.

On Tuesday, March 26, the Executive Committee discussed an audit to show the state of union finances. Where he will take almost 30 million to pay the imposed penalty is still unclear. In this context, according to information from Radiožurnál, tennis officials are most often talking about billionaire Tomáš Chrenko’s Agel group, which became the general partner of the association last year.

But his media representative Karel Tejkal refused. “Speculation and information that he personally, or one of his companies, should pay the Czech Tennis Association’s obligation to the National Sports Agency made Tomáš Chrenko laugh,” he said.

In addition, Agel, as a general partner, stopped supporting the union due to machinations with subsidies. “It is logical that the company AGEL, which (Chrenek) owns, has suspended its general partnership in response to current events and is monitoring the direction in which Czech tennis will develop. If there are positive changes, she will be happy to continue supporting Czech tennis,” added Tejkal.

Moreover, the sanction of almost 30 million crowns, which the union must pay, may not be the only one. If he pays it, the NSA will still check whether the machinations with the subsidies also took place in 2022 and 2023.

If he doesn’t pay, the NSA will hand over the case for enforcement to the tax office, and then, according to Šebek, the union accounts for the mentioned years would be checked by the tax office.

Kaderka refused to resign

In addition, the police accused the head of the union, Ivo Kaderka, and four other people of subsidy fraud and negotiating an advantage in the awarding of a public contract. According to the police, they caused damage worth 14.5 million crowns.

The management of the Czech Tennis Association has convened a general meeting to discuss changes to the statutes, the dismissal of Kaderka and the election of his successor. It is not scheduled to take place until June 7, because in the meantime the union has to draft new constitutions and the regional unions have to call their own meetings and elect delegates to the general assembly.

According to findings of Radiožurnál, Kaderka does not want to leave the head of the union. “One of the lawyers dealt with him in custody. He invited him to consider resigning, but Kaderka refused,” describes one of the well-informed sources from the sports environment.

Artur Janousek

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