The police charged former deputy governor Jakub Unucka with fraud in the awarding of small-scale public contracts | Video: Diary/Kateřina Součková
In political circles, Jakub Unucka is nicknamed the Sunshine Man – when it was not about outright tragic topics, the smile did not disappear from his face. But now the clouds are gathering over him. The police accused him of the criminal offenses of “negotiation of an advantage in the awarding of a public contract, a public tender and a public auction”, “abuse of the authority of an official” and “accepting a bribe”, and bribery of another person.
play_fill
For a politician who wants to return to the development of electronics, the last few months must be like waking up from a dream. It started in 1969 in Ostrava, where Unucka was born. In 2003, he moved to neighboring Klimkovice. He studied mechanical engineering, but he combined his professional career with computer technology. He first worked in the company Autocont, in the following years he joined the Ostrava company Gaben, specializing in automatic identification, in the position of executive director.
He was also at the birth of paperless identification projects in the Siemens and Continental corporations, he managed the implementation of production information systems in several companies. Since 2009, he has led research projects in the field of radio frequency identification (RFID) and collaborated with Czech, Slovak and Korean universities. He founded an international research laboratory of these RFID technologies at VŠB-TUO.
The public knows him mainly from municipal politics and public life. He was deputy mayor of the spa town of Klimkovice for two electoral terms (2010 to 2017), where he also serves as the chairman of the ecological civic association Čisté Klimkovice. In the ODS, which he joined in 2005, he was a member or chairman of the Novojičín region for several periods.
Since 2016, he has been Deputy Governor for Transport and Smart Region, and since 2020, 1st Deputy Governor for Industry and Smart Region. After the governor Jan Krkoška resigned this spring, paradoxically also due to taking bribes in the past, Unucka effectively acted as the unofficial top man of the region for a short time.
He is married, and he and his wife Miroslava have a daughter, Martina. This year, at the end of the holidays, he announced publicly that after the end of his political career, he wants to return to business in the field of electronics development. However, the end of the political career came faster than he might have imagined.
play_fill
For the regional elections in September, he initially appeared in the 11th place among the candidates, but subsequently announced a change. “I’m quitting politics, I’m not going to run for office,” he told Deník after messing up with the subsidies.
For the company CU IDENT, he received a subsidy in the amount of almost 505 thousand crowns for the project Renewal of business in the field of electronics development after holding a vacant political position, and his wife Miroslava Unucková received 276 thousand crowns for the project Expanding business with multi-platform database services.
When it got out that the subsidy had been approved by his political colleagues from the regional leadership, he gave up the subsidy and announced the end of politics. According to the party, he also suspended his membership in the ODS. But that may be the least of his worries for the following period. He faces up to ten years in prison after being accused by criminologists from the National Headquarters against Organized Crime.
