“Such inaccurate information about criminal proceedings cannot be tolerated. It is necessary to be professional in this,” said Tomáš Novosad, chairman of the Board of Appeal of the Prague City Court.
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The defendant’s statements were made in the main news program of the Czech Television on January 8, 2018. The television stated, on the one hand, that Vitásková “should allow the allocation of licenses to power plants, but were not entitled to higher electricity purchase prices”, and then that the woman stopped the administrative proceedings licenses should be revoked.
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According to Novosad, the first of the statements had absolutely no basis in the real state. “This has never been at stake with regard to the prosecution of the plaintiff (Vitásková). The court, which found her wrongly guilty, did not even talk about it,” the judge warned. According to him, the statement thus affected the personal rights of Vitásková.
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Novosad rejected ČT’s arguments that this was a certain simplification and that the context of the report should also be taken into account. “It is not possible to falsely report that a person is being prosecuted for certain acts when this is not the case,” he stressed.
On the contrary, according to him, the second of the statements corresponded to reality in its basis, even though Vitásková was prosecuted only for helping to stop the given administrative proceedings. “The simplification that it stopped the proceedings is recognized as valid and cannot be challenged by a lawsuit,” the judge said.
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Vitásková, who was finally completely acquitted by the judiciary in the given photovoltaic case, did not come to today’s meeting. She has long stated that the one who admitted the issuance of licenses was not her, but her predecessor, the head of the office, Josef Fiřt. She described her prosecution as part of a targeted campaign aimed at harming the ERO and her personally. Her lawyer said today that the events with the false statement were watched by about a million viewers over the age of 15.
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The photovoltaic case concerned the solar power plants Zdeněk Sun and Saša Sun, which belong to the Zdeněk Zemek empire. The power plants obtained a production license just before the end of 2010, ie at high purchase prices, although they were not completed. The court originally sent the former head of the ERO to prison for 8.5 years.
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The District Court for Prague 4 initially complied with Vitásková’s lawsuit on public television last June in full by a so-called judgment for recognition, ie without hearing the case. Television did not seem to respond in time to a court call for comment. But then it turned out that ČT sent the reaction with 300 pages of attachments in an envelope, which tore, and the post office therefore did not deliver it at all. The Board of Appeal therefore annulled the original verdict at that time and ordered that the dispute be heard. The district court then awarded Vitásková 20,000 crowns in November, but according to Novosad, he underestimated the seriousness of what had happened with this amount.
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