Final Word from Thursday, December 10, 2015
Lawyers are all over the news lately, and not for flattering reasons. MP Marie Benešová submitted an amendment for reducing corporate liability, which would coincidentally favor her law firm's client Metrostav. Milan Polák of Weinhold Legal faces a criminal charge for a model conflict of interest in the Škoda Transportation arbitration. We don't even need to explain what Radmila Kleslová was up to. For the media, these are low-hanging fruit. They're easy targets. More complicated is explaining how Czech Railways could have misplaced its records showing which lawyer drafted the one-sided contract with Škoda that lost it the Kč 1.2bn arbitration verdict. This would require a forensic investigation and a comparison of this case with the OKD privatization, in which OKD's own lawyer drafted a finance-ministry defense to the EU Commission. The lawyer for both OKD and Škoda was Radek Pokorný, and he's no low-hanging fruit. [Czech Republic ČSSD NWR construction]
Glossary of difficult words
flattering - appreciative or favorable;
liability - the state of being responsible for something, esp. by law;
low-hanging fruit - a thing or person that can be won, obtained or persuaded with little effort.