Ladislav Vydra is a pensioner from Prague. After an eye surgery, his retina fell apart and he all but lost his eyesight. Doctors gave him no prospects for improvement. Andrzej, a man from Poland, has his hearing impaired but does not want to use hearing aid yet. Both of them trusted ads for miraculous products,...
“She’s a little deranged. She doesn’t understand how subsidies work at all,” Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš said of MEP Monika Hohlmeier following the European Parliament’s Budgetary Control Committee’s early March fact-finding mission to the Czech Republic. Led by Hohlmeier, the objective of the mission was to gain insights into the distribution of EU funds...
“Over the past weeks, several EU governments took emergency measures to address the health crisis caused by the outbreak of the coronavirus. We are living in extraordinary times, and governments, in principle, need to have the necessary tools to act rapidly and effectively to protect the public health of our citizens,” European Commission President Ursula...
To effectively fight the coronavirus pandemic, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland are introducing various smartphone apps that promise to increase the safety of citizens and eventually loosen lockdown measures. But in practice, enforcing this kind of digital leash raises many privacy and data security concerns. A project that purports to be a “way to quickly...
30 years later after the fall of communism, Central Europe’s industries are connected to the West in innumerable ways. But signs that its nuclear industry continues to be heavily influenced by Russian interests are everywhere. In the Czech Republic, the most prominent nuclear engineering company is owned by a Russian energy giant. In Slovakia, Russian-led...
The US government recently went after some of Prigozhin’s assets, but there’s more. The shadowy interests of Yevgeny Prigozhin — a Russian businessman and close associate of President Vladimir Putin — have just become a little clearer. Over the past year, reporters from OCCRP’s Russian partner, Novaya Gazeta, tracked the registration details and movements of...