Prague lost a dispute with a powerful official of the mayor of Bema
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In his time, one of the most influential Prague officials, the former head of the property section, Peter Ďurica, definitely succeeded in a dispute with the Prague City Hall.
He ruled that the resignation he received in 2011 after the arrival of Mayor Bohuslav Svoboda is not valid.
The dispute reached the Supreme Court, which has now rejected an appeal filed by Prague in a dispute against the verdicts of lower instances. The verdict that sided with Ďurici is thus final.
Judge of the Supreme Court Jiří Doležílek confirmed that earlier court decisions in this dispute do not deviate from the case law. And he found no other formal errors in their verdicts.
“The appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court,” confirmed Hana Marsová, a spokeswoman for the District Court for Prague 1, which decided the case.
A spokesman for the Prague City Hall, Vít Hofman, then stated that the office was acquainted with the court’s decision. “We are considering the next step,” he added.
Ďuric’s lawyer Pavel Drumev wrote to the editors that he could not express himself at all, because he was bound by secrecy.
At the Prague City Hall, Ďurica was the head of the property section from the end of 2002 until the aforementioned beginning of 2011. At that time, he was one of the most influential officials in Prague.
The dispute concerned that when he was fired in January 2011, he took a leave of absence. The municipality then sent him a resignation by post, but the fired official did not take it over.
His lawyer, Drumev, said Durica would be demanding a salary in court sooner. It will be at least 12 million crowns, because Ďuric’s salary exceeded 100 thousand crowns a month.
As it turned out from the leaked wiretaps published in 2012 in MF Dnes, Ďurica, for example, consulted with the then influential Prague businessman Roman Janoušek on the lease of property to the municipality.
And when Ďurica doubted the convenience, Janoušek told him according to the wiretaps: “Close your eye, it’s okay.”
At that time, the media also described that Ďurica had signature rights to bank accounts that belonged to Janoušek in Switzerland. It was on them that investigators blocked (and later unblocked) about 200 million crowns.