The EC is investigating allegedly unjustified subsidies for large farmers in the Czech Republic

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The European Commission has launched an in-depth investigation into the allegedly unauthorized allocation of EU subsidies to large Czech agricultural enterprises. The European Union executive announced in a press release that it had doubts, among other things, about subsidies for restructuring and irrigation of farms, the allocation of which to large companies instead of smaller companies could violate EU rules. According to the People's MEP Tomáš Zdechovský, at least two cases concerned companies connected with the Agrofert holding . ČTK finds out the statements of the Czech authorities. At the end of last year, the Commission dealt with several suggestions which, according to Zdechovský, it received after the February mission of a group of MEPs in the Czech Republic. After a thorough examination of subsidies related to fruit orchards, it came to the conclusion that some large companies collected subsidies in the order of tens of millions of euros (hundreds of millions of crowns), which were intended for small and medium-sized companies. According to the EC, another problematic scheme concerned crop and livestock insurance contributions, which again received large companies instead of small or medium-sized enterprises. The commission said, the commission's evaluation revealed that this support had already been granted in the past to beneficiaries who had been mistakenly identified by the Czech authorities as small and medium-sized enterprises, even though they were in fact large companies. The names of the companies concerned were not published by the EU executive. According to Zdechovský, however, in at least two cases these are companies connected with Agrofert. Commission said, I have confirmed that the Commission's investigation concerns companies around Agrofert in at least two cases. I will ask the EC to provide details of the identified irregularities and a timetable in which it will deal with several Agrofert cases at one of the next meetings of the Committee on Budgetary Control. EC auditors have long been dealing with agrofert due to Prime Minister Andrej Babiš's ties to his former company. Although Babiš invested the holding in trust funds, according to the findings of the EC auditors, it still has an influence on it and is therefore in conflict of interest. The Commission should send a final version of the audit to the Czech Republic in January, on the basis of which it will probably not pay subsidies to companies around Agrofert from the summer of 2018, when the stricter EU rules on conflicts of interest entered into force. The Czechia could thus return up to around 450 million crowns to the EU budget. The prime minister has long rejected claims about his conflict of interest.