The State as a Private Bank Account
When politics and big business come together: The example of Andrej Babiš shows how a head of government can use political power and state subsidies to benefit his own businesses. Five warning signs show how kleptocracy develops—and why this is not just a problem in the Czech Republic.
This special series draws on CORRECTIV.Exile’s network of journalists and professionals who document, despite continuing pressure, how authoritarian leaders learn from one another and accelerate democratic backsliding worldwide . We aim to reveal patterns: Hungary’s methods replicated in Poland, Russia’s “foreign agent” laws spreading to Georgia and Serbia. This is not an isolated crisis but a coordinated global shift — a warning before legal becomes irreversible, before democracy becomes memory. Three weeks before he will swear the oath of office for the third time, designated Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš’s company buys a port. Not a whole port, but an ammonia terminal on Rotterdam’s waterfront for 290 million euros , with fertilizer raw material flowing in from the sea. In the same weeks, the company pays its owner a dividend. Five billion Czech crowns before tax, 4.25 billion after: This equates to about 170 million euros, or, on a prime minister’s salary, twelve centuries of work. Then he places the shares in a trust for his three children, and on December 15th, 2025, the cabinet is sworn in. Nobody has broken a law. Keep that sentence in mind. It will be true at every step of this story, and that’s why it matters. That same year, a German “ZEIT”-documentary listed what Donald Trump’s second term brought his family: crypto ventures, a jumbo jet from Qatar, and a lawsuit against his own government for presumed tax relief. Its title posed a question: “Kleptokratie made in USA?” . This chapter asks a question that connects both cases and concerns us directly: what happens to a democracy when its prime minister is, legally, its largest recipient of public funds – and how many European countries have already experienced this firsthand?
Kleptocracy comes from the Greek for “rule by thieves.” It describes a state whose institutions enrich the people who run it. Unlike bribery, it often breaks no laws: the rules are (re)written so money flows to those in charge.
In 2012, a year after founding his political movement, Andrej Babiš explained to his employees why he, a billionaire, wanted a seat in government. In the company magazine , he wrote that confronting the systemic corruption of Czech politics and media “unfortunately cannot be done otherwise than by entering politics”. Silvio Berlusconi said much the same in 1994, Bidzina Ivanishvili in 2011, and Donald Trump in 2015: “I’m really rich,” he told the crowd at his campaign launch. The voters understood: a man with that much money, they reasoned, cannot be bought. The claim is always the same: wealth makes a politician incorruptible. However, the record states the opposite. This is illustrated in each case presented in this chapter by four recurring roles a rich man plays as he enters politics. Understanding these roles is the key to understand how kleptocracy is set up.
Corruption stories are usually told in numbers, and numbers are easy to forget. However, people remember the absurd details, and in them lies the evidence. Each following example shows that the businessman-politician fears no consequences. On the contrary, the examples show him benefitting from impunity. Across Europe, three kinds of impunity recur, each sending a message to a different audience. The first is the display, aimed at the public: I am untouchable.
Andrej Babiš was born in Bratislava. He founded his company in 1993 as the Prague subsidiary of Petrimex, the Slovak state’s chemicals trader, where he had worked since the 1980s. Two years after founding the company, 65 percent of it was transferred to the Swiss company called O.F.I. , registered in Zug, as part of a capital increase. Who actually owned O.F.I. has never been established .
From that base, he built the largest agrochemical group in Central Europe — about 230 companies, 28,000 staff, and 212 billion crowns in revenue. To a German reader, the striking thing is how much of it lies outside the Czech Republic.
The empire spans over nine countries, but the public money that flows into it comes from one place. A single body pays it out: the State Agricultural Intervention Fund in Prague, the agency that distributes EU and national farm money to every Czech farmer. It answers to the agriculture minister, who answers to the prime minister. And every crown it pays is on the public record.
We have those public records and ask them one question: how much money did the agency pay the prime minister’s companies, year by year — and did it change when he entered or left government? The agency publishes every recipient , the finance ministry lays out every grant registered and the company lists every subsidiary. We matched the three reports for the last twelve years in which Babiš was politically active. It was the same when Babiš held the shares himself and when a trust did; the same when he was in government and when he was in opposition. In every year from 2017 to 2021 the group received more in subsidies than it paid in corporate tax. Five institutions were built to stop this. Here is what each one was, and how each one was stopped:
The Czech case is unusual only in how completely it is documented. Compared with the other cases in this series, it yields five signals that appear, in this order, wherever an owner-politician turns the state into his company’s customer. None of them is a crime. Each is visible in public records before the money actually moves.
In Czechia, Babiš bought the newspapers and the radio station in June and November 2013; he took a finance ministry post shortly after, in January 2014. Similarly, Berlusconi owned the TV channels before he founded his party; Orbán’s allies assembled the outlets before founding their party and then absorbed them. A businessman buying news media with no history of interest in journalism, within a year of an election, is the earliest signal there is, and the one the Czech media law of 2023 finally recognized, forcing a sale of Babiš’s media within months.
Signal 2: a trust whose beneficiaries are the family
The word “blind” is doing the work. In the Czech Republic in 2017, the trustees of Babiš’s two trusts were the company’s own managers and the “family protector” was his wife; his new Czech trust of 2026, the beneficiaries are Babiš’s three children and the trust’s statute permits him to return as administrator once he leaves public life, if the family council approves it. Wherever a trust is presented as the solution, there are three questions to ask: who are the beneficiaries, who appoints the trustee, and what happens to the shares afterwards.
Signal 3: the company’s people sit where the money is decided
In the Czech Republic that means an Agrofert board member serving on the supervisory board of the agency responsible for distributing funds to the group; a plant manager becoming the minister overseeing the ministry approves its grants and five members of parliament on the group’s payroll, all belonging to the same party. This is the signal that turns an entitlement into a system, and it is the one the commercial register shows anyone who looks. The test is not whether the people are competent. It is whether the payer and the payee share a personnel file.
Signal 4: the recovery that is announced and then disappears
In the Czech Republic the agriculture ministry announced it would reclaim “5.1 billion crowns” of Babiš’s subsidies, then “more than seven billion”; then it opened two proceedings worth millions; then, four months after the election, nothing. The legal reasoning remained unpublished. The same curve appears in Hungary under Orbán after every OLAF report, and in Serbia under Vučić after the Novi Sad station collapse. A large recovery figure announced by a minister is worth less than a small one enforced by a court; the signal is the gap between the two, and the election that sits between them.
Signal 5: the law is rewritten to fit one person
The final move is never evasion. It is legislation: a bill that confines the subsidy ban to a minister’s own ministry and cuts the recovery period from ten years to four, tabled in August 2026 by Babiš’s own coalition. Orbán’s Hungary did it with its university foundations, Fico’s Slovakia with its special prosecutor’s office. When a conflict-of-interest law is amended in the first year of a new government, the amendment is the signal.
None of the five is Czech-specific. Each is a playbook habit and a scene you will recognize the next time it plays, wherever it plays. Each leaves a trace in a register that a reader can check: a media transaction, a trust deed, a board appointment, a ministry’s press release, a parliamentary bill. That is the point of following the money the way ProPublica suggests: not to prove a crime, which is the court’s task, but to show the machine while it is still being assembled, while the warning signs are still easy to spot and the institutions that could act still exist.
We did not ask whether Andrej Babiš is corrupt. That question sits before the Czech court, which the parliament has stopped, and a French one that has not yet decided. We asked something the registers can answer: what happens to a democracy when the head of government is, legally, its largest subsidy recipient, and every institution that could interfere reports to him. The answer is in three dates. A dividend paid before the trust. A port bought before the oath. A clause in the trust deed written for after the term. One logic, no crime. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _