Langer, Rozbořil and PPP

15.10.2015 - EB

The raids that brought down the government of Petr Nečas were so easy to quantify. Although they related to everything from expensive trinkets to abuse of Military Intelligence, they could all be conveniently lumped together as the "Nagyová case." Even those who blamed the police and the prosecutors for staging a coup settled on this, because almost no one liked Jana Nagyová, except for Nečas himself, for some strange reason. This latest scandal is different. It, too, includes everything but the kitchen sink, from filching EU subsidies to trading in state secrets, but everyone has his own favorite villain and therefore preferred name for it. For Právo it's the Ivan Langer case. For MFD, it's becoming the Jiří Rozbořil case. For part of the media, the police are the chief culprits. Deník spoke of "businessmen, police and politicians," which in Czech conveniently works out to PPP. It was indeed a sort of public/private partnership, wasn't it?

Glossary of difficult words

Ivan Langer - ex-interior minister and ex-vice chair of ODS;

Jiří Rozbořil - current Olomouc regional governor, from ČSSD; 

PPP - (in English, also used as an abbreviation in Czech) public/private partnership; a business relationship between a private-sector company and a government agency for the purpose of completing a project that will serve the public; 

trinket - a small ornament or piece of jewelry that is of little value; 

to lump together - to put in an indiscriminate mass or group; to treat as alike without regard for particulars; 

everything but the kitchen sink - almost everything one can think of; 

to filch - to pilfer or steal something in a casual way; 

businessmen, police and politicians - in Czech, podnikatelé, policisté a politici.



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