Head of Czech Environmental Inspectorate Dodges Questions About Family's Criminal Past

The director of the Czech Environmental Inspectorate (ČIŽP), Pavel Straka, has spent several weeks avoiding questions about the criminal past of his closest relatives. According to a journalistic investigation, his brother Luděk was convicted of drug trafficking, while their mother was convicted of harassing tenants and unlawfully interfering with their right to housing. At the time the sentences were handed down, both were living in the same house as Pavel Straka.

Straka now holds a post that gives him decisive authority over environmental protection matters — it was his signature that halted independent expert assessments of the burning Heřmanice slag heap in Ostrava, a site posing a risk of an ecological disaster worth billions of crowns. Those assessments could have identified who was responsible for the damage.

A family business in drug dealing

According to the land registry, last year brother Luděk gave Pavel Straka half of the family villa in Lanžhot in southern Moravia; the brothers also jointly own another house on a nearby street. Both men have law degrees and worked as attorneys.

It has emerged that in 2015 Luděk Straka was taken into custody after Austria requested his detention, suspecting him of selling 3.5 kilograms of marijuana on Austrian territory. A Czech court extradited him to the Austrian authorities, but thanks to a suspended sentence he ultimately served only the time he had already spent in custody. The Austrian verdict, which the editorial team has obtained, states: "Committed the crime of drug trafficking and unlawful handling of narcotic substances."

Attorney Jan Farkač, who represented the Straka family in criminal cases for many years and does not consider himself bound by attorney-client privilege, claims: "They ran it as a family business — everyone had their role. The cannabis was grown on their property in Lanžhot: one building held a plantation under grow lights, another an outdoor plot. I saw it myself, and I also saw a hashish-pressing operation. The sons handled distribution, driving the product to Austria, where they had buyers."

A longtime family acquaintance who had spoken with the brothers' father corroborated a similar account, on condition of anonymity. The father himself — previously charged in 2006 with driving under the influence, when police recorded a blood alcohol level of 1.6 per mille, though attorney Farkač disputed the measurement and son Pavel Straka testified that he hadn't smelled alcohol on his father — has since died.

Tenant harassment and an extortion trial

The inspectorate director's mother, Alena Straková, owns a building in Brno where, according to the court ruling, she collected advance payments from tenants for gas but never forwarded the money to the supplier — as a result, the gas was cut off and apartment temperatures dropped to 9.5 degrees Celsius. The court found that the goal was to pressure tenants into moving out on their own, thereby avoiding the obligation to provide them with alternative housing.

Pavel Straka himself appeared before the district court in Břeclav in 2009, at the age of 26, on extortion charges — prosecutors alleged that he and an accomplice forced a man, using force and threats, to lend them his car. The court acquitted Straka for lack of evidence.

An opaque appointment and a dash from reporters

Straka — a donor to and former candidate for the Motorists for Themselves party — was appointed to his post over the summer by Environment Minister Igor Červeny. Previously unknown in professional circles, the lawyer has no verified experience in environmental protection, but did run for the Chamber of Deputies for the same party and financially supported it. The commission that recommended his candidacy to the minister reportedly consisted mostly of people close to the Motorists.

The inspectorate has kept his detailed biography under wraps, releasing only a generic profile, while Straka himself cancelled a meeting with members of the relevant parliamentary committee, citing vacation leave. Since he took office, a number of long-serving experts have left the inspectorate — management described this as routine staff turnover.

Two weeks ago, journalists managed to catch Straka leaving the Ministry of the Environment after a meeting. Spotting the press, he turned around and disappeared back inside the building, offering only the line "contact the press office." His official Škoda Kodiaq was conspicuously driven away by ministry staff while the official himself slipped away unnoticed in a different vehicle — a black limousine.

The Ministry of the Environment stated that Straka met all the formal requirements for the position, and that vetting officials' personal ties and private lives falls outside the legal requirements placed on the ministry.

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Source: seznamzpravy.cz