Bribers and bribees

On the same day that MF Dnes broke one of the most-revealing corruption scandals in recent years, Tereza Strnadová of the daily wrote that politicians can never know when their words are being recorded. The lesson most people would draw from this is that politicians need to clean up their act; but of course many politicians read it as a warning for them to be more careful about what they say, not what they do. Companies are a bit slower to get such a warning, because Czech journalists have tended to avoid naming the bribers in corruption scandals and prefer to concentrate on the bribees. For example, we still don't know which law firm and which bank were eager to pay for juicy deals from the SFŽP ecology fund, although MFD promises to reveal them in short order. This has started a guessing game in Prague, the outcome of which is hard to predict with any certainty, because there are so many possibilities.