71. Round up

The Czech Republic is undergoing a judicial scandal that deserves some kind of reward for brazenness:

 The saga of the troubled Union Banka (UB) took some strange turns this week. It began on Monday when a court in Usti nad Labem declared a joint-stock company called Ceska revitalizacni bankrupt. The company, according to Judge Jiri Berka, was the former UB, transformed into a joint-stock firm and declared bankrupt at the request of its former managers, led by former CEO Roman Mentlik.

Mentlik quickly denied any involvement in the move to convert UB to a joint-stock company, move its headquarters to Most, and have it declared bankrupt. ...

UB's owner - the Italian company Invesmart - cried foul immediately, saying whoever had filed the bankruptcy petition (and launched the bank's transformation to a joint stock company) had committed fraud. It filed criminal charges.

It must be disconcerting when a company you own changes business structure and declares bankruptcy without  notice to you.  The Czech Business Weekly is concerned about "the Czech Republic’s image as a hotbed of high-level corruption – and a potentially untrustworthy NATO member", but unfortunately the image might not be entirely undeserved: Jan Mareš, the head of the National Security Office - a kind of liaison to NATO - resigned after "transcripts of his phone calls showed his connection to a gang of corrupt bankruptcy administrators led by disgraced judge Jiří Berka."  (More here.)

For everyone who has ever thought perfecting security interests was boring, there's a phrase to roll around your tongue: "a gang of corrupt bankruptcy administrators."  Mareš strongly denied any wrongful connection to the gang, but you have to admire his explanation for why he accepted a valuable watch from them: "The spirit of a lawyer always dominates inside me, so until I have a piece of evidence about guilt, I respect presumption of innocence."  Lawyers, you see, are just naturally such trusting and unsuspicious people.

Malta, meanwhile, has just seen its 2002 judicial corruption scandal return to the news with the circumstantially detailed confession of a bribe-giver.   The man described in court exactly how he went about securing a reduction in a criminal sentence for the price of $27,700.  (The Maltese lira is worth $2.77.)  Here's a timeline of the earlier revelations in the case, and here's a prescient commentary from 2001 warning against the appointment of the implicated chief justice. 

The commentary asserts that "[a]broad it is considered unethical for the judiciary to have indirect business concerns".  If someone told the Maltese editorialist about Delaware's real-estate tycoon/Judge Farnan  (see post 64), he might be less hard on his own country's judiciary.

From the Mediterranean to the Black Sea: The former president of the Bucharest City Court, Maria Huza, is facing trial for allegedly using the powers of her office to obtain "an apartment of almost one hundred square meters on Ion Pilat Street, near the city's Civic Center", according to the Bucharest Daily News.  She supposedly obtained apartments for her daughter and her father, as well. 

Here's the worst part: the apartment the judge snagged for herself "was from the real estate fund for newlyweds".  Somewhere in Bucharest a newly-married couple is forced to set up housekeeping in a parent's home, thanks to Judge Huza.

The difference between the United States and these struggling little European statelings is that, in America, attorneys who accuse judges of wrongdoing are promptly punished.   (See post 68.)  That's the sign of a mature, even slightly overripe, democracy.