In the service of the Chinese
The Czech civil-service law gives broad employment guarantees to people who opt to serve the state, and it is also quite benevolent toward those who decide to leave the civil service of their own accord. They must be allowed to leave within 60 days, and only a handful of the tens of thousands of civil servants are subject to a noncompete clause. The state secretary for EU affairs is not one of them. He can leave the civil service on, say, March 31, and start working for a company linked to a foreign government the following Mon. This is apparently what Tomáš Prouza intends to do. When the top four Czech government officials issued a statement in Oct. confirming the CR's policy toward China, there were reports in the media that the idea for the statement had come from Prouza and Jaroslav Tvrdík of CEFC. If Prouza now goes to work for Tvrdík, it will raise the uncomfortable question of when exactly the state secretary started serving the Chinese.
Glossary of difficult words
of one's own accord - voluntarily or without outside intervention;noncompete clause - a clause under which one party (usually an employee) agrees not to enter into or start a similar profession or trade in competition against another party (usually the employer).