Agrofert subsidies: Czech ministry says it is too late to recover

The Czech Ministry of Agriculture refuses to recover unlawfully paid subsidies from companies in the Agrofert holding: according to the ministry, the legal deadline for doing so has already passed. Last year, then-minister Petr Hladík (KDU-ČSL) ordered that part of the money be reclaimed.

The deadline expired under the previous minister

“The three-year deadline expired at the end of 2023,” said ministry spokeswoman Jana Schillerová. The finding that the law was broken remains in force, the ministry stressed.

Hladík claims he did not know the deadlines had run out. He ordered the recovery of the first subsidies paid out on 20 August last year. It concerned 280,000 crowns for Agro Jevišovice, a company within Agrofert that received the money for planting trees in breach of the law.

The largest sum – about 1.1 million crowns – went to the Research Institute of Organic Syntheses in Rybitví in the Pardubice Region. It then belonged to Agrofert and was sold to the Kaprain group in February 2024. The authorities confirmed this year, in replies to questions from the Pirate Party, that the support was unlawful.

Two deadlines and confusion over the rules

The current ministry, headed in Babiš’s government by Igor Červený (Motorists), explains that the subsidy would have to be withdrawn under the budget rules, where the usual limitation period is ten years. It derives the three-year deadline from the civil code. It did not explain why it combines both approaches.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Administrative Court ruled in a similar case that the return of money is governed precisely by the budget rules and that the ten-year period should be applied first.

Kryštof Doležal, a lawyer at the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International, considers it almost impossible that the ministry did not know which law sets the deadline. “We cannot rule out that this is a continuation of a tactic of obfuscation,” he said.

What the ministry knew

The law prohibits giving subsidies to firms controlled by a member of the government. In 2017, Babiš placed his shares in Agrofert – the country’s largest group in agriculture and food processing – into trust funds to meet the conflict-of-interest law. Courts, however, have repeatedly confirmed that he continued to control the conglomerate. Agrofert also operates in chemicals and renewable energy and employs about 18,000 people in Czechia.

Hladík, who took over the ministry in March 2023, said he instructed the state secretary and the Environment Fund to pursue recovery, and that in November 2025 he was informed that action had begun. But according to the ministry’s statement at the time, the company had not even received a call to return the money voluntarily. In its reply to the Pirates’ request, the ministry admitted that it was only preparing the recovery: it had neither a timetable nor a legal analysis.

According to Schillerová, the ministry did not know it was too late to recover the money and found out during a further review. She did not say exactly when – probably under the current Babiš government. “Until then we considered the procedure legitimate,” she said.

The subsidy to the Rybitví institute was handled by the State Environmental Fund. According to spokeswoman Stanislava Beyerová, the deadline for recovery there expired in November 2022, when the ministry was briefly headed by Hladík’s predecessor and party leader Marian Jurečka, and before him by Anna Hubáčková (KDU-ČSL). The fund also cites the EU regulation on the protection of the Union’s financial interests: authorities have four years to open proceedings over an irregularity in the use of a subsidy, and that period can be interrupted, for example, by formally notifying the recipient.

If the fund let the deadline lapse, it is necessary to find out whether this could have been avoided, Doležal notes. “If it turned out that the failure to recover the money was intentional and without good legal reason, it could even be a criminal offence,” he said. In that case, investigators and a court should examine the conduct of the authority and the people responsible.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz