Czech President Václav Klaus has refused to intervene in the case of the Czech political poster defacer Roman Smetana saying that his circumstances don’t merit it.

Exactly a year ago, Czech Position was the first publication to report on the scandal surrounding the Key Investments brokerage, which could be dubbed as the Czech equivalent of the Bernie Madoff case. While the US finance fraudster received a 150-year prison sentence, the main protagonists in the Czech scandal remain free — thanks to the level of morality and expertise in the Czech police and judiciary.

Czech Position has learned that the Center for Economics and Politics (CEP), the think tank founded by President Václav Klaus in 1998 after he stepped down as prime minister, entrusted money to Key Investments, an opaque brokerage under investigation by the central bank — and got most of it back. Meanwhile, two Prague city districts have yet to see huge sums of taxpayers’ money sunk into junk and illiquid bonds returned.

The Key Investments scandal in which, among others, the names of Czech presidential advisor Jiří Weigl and Environment Minister Tomáš Chalupa appear has taken another twist and is likely to come to a head soon. Now the past has caught up with another Czech cabinet member – Minister of Industry and Trade Martin Kocourek – whose mother invested Kč 16.4 million with the dodgy brokerage.