Podivné zastavení policejního prověřování Pavla Severy

The Anticorruption Endowment (NFPK) has the text of a Czech Police resolution from June 2017, concerning the adjournment of a criminal complaint against Pavel Severa, a long-time political figure of the past and now the General Secretary of TOP 09. Police have checked on him for two years over the suspicion of his complicity to a serious crime, namely concerning fraud in a case of bills of exchange to the tune of just below 11 million CZK. A 16-page police document comprises if a detailed description of serious doubts, discrepancies and written documents that serve as an evidence against that person, Severa. Police eventually adjourned the case, citing the presumption of innocence, the principle of “dubio pro reo” in the culprit’s favour and the absence of direct evidence.                            

After the death of businessman Zdeněk Švec in December 2013, his long-time neighbour and friend, Pavel Severa, produced three bills of exchange and claimed compensation for a sum exceeding four million crowns, claiming he loaned the money to his friend in the past. During the businessman’s life, nobody in his closest environment was not aware of the existence of bills dating from 2011 and 2012 and no record of such existed. Pavel Severa also produced a 2016 bill of exchange, ostensibly proving that he had also lent CZK 6.5 million to the deceased. Two months before the businessman’s death, Severa used the said bill of exchange to obtain immovable property in Prague’s Vinohrady borough for the benefit of his mother-in-law. At that time the property was owned by the concern registered in Zdeněk Švec’s name and its price should have been realized against the bill. No one in that businessman’s environment was aware of the bill and the sum lent, at the time.

In the closing stages of his life, businessman Zdeněk Švec suffered an organic brain damage, acerbated by drug and alcohol substantially altered his recognition faculties and gradually changed the quality of his signature. An expert opinion commissioned by the police stated that the mutual comparison of the businessman’s signatures and the unusual form of his first name on three bills of exchange “proves that the signatures were made in one situation although they should have been months apart, according to the signing date.” Severa also admitted to the police that the documents proving the bills real do not exist. Police failed to establish to what purpose businessman Švec was supposed to use the means loaned to him. But police proved a conflict between Severa’s testimony and provable facts and explicitly declared that “the explanation provided by Mr Severa is untrue”. Police also explicitly acknowledged that the testimony of witness proposed by Severa is purpose-driven, fabricated and untrue. Pavel Severa’s family exercised their right to deny testimony to pre-empt the prosecution of a closely related person. Police stated the following in their resolution: “After the evaluation of the evidence, it is safe to say, with a certain measure of probability, that the facts ascertained indicate that a criminal act of fraud may have been implicated in the given case. It was supposedly committed by the suspect, namely Mgr. Pavel Severa by abusing the reduced cognitive and self-control faculties of Ing. Z. Švec, induced by alcohol consumption intake and health condition, fraudulently solicited, possibly by means of applying pressure, the signing of the disputed documents (…) and presenting them as his claim in the succession proceedings invited before or after the death of Ing. Švec as a manner of refurbishing the price of a real estate to be acquired. This conclusion is supported by a range of indirect pieces of evidence that usher doubts and possibly also discrepancies into the testimony as presented by suspect Mgr. P. Severa.“ Despite the doubts cited above, police have adjourned criminal proceedings.

“The case adjournment by the police is really a strange thing to do, since according to the criminal code a police body shall decide to start criminal proceedings if the facts ascertained evidence a crime was committed. But this is what the police explicitly stated in their exhausting resolution…,” notes NFPK Analyst Martin Soukenka.      

The Anticorruption Endowment is a fully independent initiative by people radically unprepared to accept a high level of corruption in state administration. One of our goals is to help expose corruption in state administration and support projects exposing corruption.

 

Contacts: Martin Soukenka, NFPK Analyste-mail: martin.soukenka@nfpk.cz