Czech Minister of Finance Zbyněk Stanjura has rejected opposition calls for his resignation as more embarrassing details emerge from the bitcoin scandal.

The unprecedented scandal has already cost a seat of Stanjura’s ODS party colleague and Minister of Justice, Pavel Blažek, after it was revealed that Blažek’s ministry had accepted CZK1bn (€40mn) in bitcoin from a sentenced drug dealer, Tomáš Jiřikovský, who donated the bitcoins after his release from prison in 2021. The donation is under police investigation.

“I view the bitcoin affair as a failure of Minister Blažek and his office, and I repeat again that the Ministry of Finance had nothing to do with the whole process, nor with the Justice resort decision to accept a billion from a drug dealer,” Stanjura wrote on his Twitter social media profile.

Stanjura made the comments following his interview with the country’s online news outlet Seznam Zprávy (SZ), in which he admitted that he knew about Blažek’s plans to accept the suspicious donation, but he tried to talk him out of it.

“I saw a potential political problem in it,” Stanjura told SZ after he stated he had no power to prevent Blažek from accepting the donation.

Stanjura’s words left many observers of the country’s politics in awe, fuelling more speculation about the extent of Blažek’s informal powers in the centre-right cabinet of Petr Fiala. Separately, SZ also reported  that the donated bitcoins arrived from an illegal marketplace, Nucleus, even though the bitcoins were supposed to be legal.

Moreover, Czech Radio (CRo) reported that the Ministry of Justice had already sold some of the bitcoins in 78 auctions between March and May at a 10% discount, marking the first time that a public institution in Czechia sold a cryptocurrency.

Economist Richard Hindls told Czech Radio (CRo) that such bitcoin transactions would not have been possible in the banking sector. “Banks are very careful in this and I am convinced that in this situation they would have acted differently,” Hindls was quoted as saying by CRo.  

Earlier this week, Czechia’s liberal President Petr Pavel addressed the country's parliament and called the ongoing bitcoin scandal “a major problem” harming the country abroad as well. The largest opposition party, populist ANO of billionaire ex-Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, called on the whole cabinet to resign.

Blažek’s resignation comes just four months before the October elections, which are widely expected to be won by ANO, which regularly polls above 30% and has a more than 10% lead ahead of the Fiala-led SPOLU joint list, which is struggling to secure even 20% support.

The scandal could reduce the support for the ruling coalition parties from Fiala’s cabinet, which is already one of the least popular cabinets on record. Meanwhile, several far-right and anti-EU parties are polling above or around the 5% parliamentary threshold, including the stalwart far-right SPD, anti-green Motorists and red-brown STAČILO! (It’s been enough!) list.

While in the cabinet, Blažek had a firm backing from his ODS party colleague, Fiala, which enabled him to weather allegations of meddling in a court case involving ODS politicians, as well as an off-the-record meeting with a Kremlin-linked lobbyist.

Blažek is seen as instrumental in having secured party support for Fiala when he first became chairman of the neoliberal ODS in 2014, a time when ODS was facing an existential crisis after its cabinet, led by Petr Nečas, collapsed in 2013 amid corruption allegations. Fiala also praised Blažek’s work at the ministry when commenting on the resignation.

“Incidentally, he [Blažek] decided to resign on the day when the Chamber of Deputies passed the amendment of the criminal law, praised by professionals and wider public,” Fiala was quoted as saying by CT, adding that Blažek has accomplished the “modernisation of Czech justice”.