At the beginning of July, the court illegally imposed three and six years in prison and a suspended sentence on three officials for illegally issuing plots. Part of the verdict was also the seizure of some other issued lands, for example in Dolní Měcholupy, Hostivař or Kolín. According to the judge, the restituents knew that they were not entitled to them.
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The three defendants – Jan Horák, Eva Benešová and Petr Chmelík – lodged a complaint against the decision. Officials who accuse the prosecution of causing at least 1.4 billion crowns in damage by illegally issuing plots have denied the blame from the beginning.
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“There is no doubt about the ownership right of the Czech Republic to the real estate in question,” said Senate President Jana Miklová. According to today’s decision, the lands that were part of the original historic Bečvář’s farm should return to the state. It is mainly a plot near the metro station Depo Hostivař, which according to information from the real estate cadastre currently belongs to Emilia Bednářová. The court also ruled on several smaller plots of land that Bednářová owns together with other restituents.
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The court returned the plots to the owners to whom they belonged before the decision of the land office officials. On the basis of these decisions, the woman and other restituents mostly received replacement land for real estate originally belonging to Jan Maria Bečvář, although they were entitled to inheritance only from his siblings. They also acquired several plots of land left over from the original farm.
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After the Bečvář’s siblings, the restituents acquired land in Prague worth an estimated three billion crowns. According to an earlier statement by Radim Zika, the director of the Land Fund of the Czech Republic, the family could not get the original plots of the so-called Strašnice estate because they were built up or transferred to someone else. Bečvář’s communists confiscated a large area, on which today stands, for example, the Don Giovanni hotel, Rádio Svobodná Evropa or the Solidarita housing estate.
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