MARCH 23, 1999

C U R R E N T   A F F A I R S

[ March 22 ]
[ March 19 ] [ March 18 ] [ March 17 ] [ March 16 ] [ March 15 ]

Streaming RA / RA Download

The decision was delayed so that the government could gather more detailed information from the Temelin commission, concerning the what has already become the largest ever investment by a Czech government. The Ministers of Environment, Trade and Industry and, Finance and Employment and Social Affairs have been set the task of putting forward alternative scenarios - the first detailing the implications of completing the project - the second detailing the implication of terminating its construction. Around two hundred environmental campaigners demonstrated yesterday outside the government offices, where the cabinet were sitting to try and reach a final decision about the future of the station. The Cabinet itself appears deeply split over the issue, with the Minister of the Environment, Milos Kuzvart, strongly opposed to Temelin's completion, and Trade and Industry Minister, Miroslav Gregr insisting that the project must be finished.

Kuzvart recently described the power plant as a 'national disgrace', and argues that alternative sources of power would create more jobs than Temelin. Gregr, on the other hand, sees Temelin as the only way of assuring the country's power requirements for the first decade of the next millennium.

The Enviromentalists, however, are eager to open a full public debate into the future of Temelin.

Organizers of such scums are constantly looking for new ways in which they can convince people to "drown" their money in their games and companies. In the Czech Republic, anyone who operates in such scams can face up to two years in prison. But although the police, lawyers, and courts of law have been trying to run down on these cases, they have been rather unsuccessful due to their lack of experience as well as the conmen who have found an easy way to outsmart the law. What do they do? They simply call their scam a game instead of an investment.

One of the most famous is the pyramid scheme, known to many as the airplane, in which the participant basically earns money by convincing several others to also take part. Here's a simple explanation. The conman goes to three people and tells them to give him 200 crowns each, amounting to six hundred crowns with the promise that they will get back twice as much if they each convince three more to join the game and pay 200 crowns. That would bring in nine new people amounting to 1800 crowns. The first three would then be given back double the money they put in, ie. 400 crowns, totaling to 1200 leaving the conman with 600. The nine new people would each bring in 3 more, collect double their investment and so on.

Naturally, the money put in in reality concerns thousands of crowns. It sounds like an easy way to make money but can cost you dearly if you are at the end of the line and the conman has disappeared with all your money.

According to a police officer who wanted to remain annonymous, desperate, naive, and trusting people will always be around. He added that the pyramid scheme is now outdated as conmen have found a new way to scam Czech citizens. This one entails the sale of fake stocks. People are promised that in two years they will be worth 40% more of what they are now and several thousand fall for it, buy them, for large sums of money and, when it's time to collect, realize that what they bought is fake and therefore of no value.

According to lawyer, Helena Chaloupkova, the money put into such games often disperses somewhere making it difficult to locate the person who holds responsibility for the scam. The police and state prosecutors furthermore lack motivation as, in the cases that have managed to make it to court, no verdict has been given in their favour so far. 

The statistics you have just heard ensue from a survey, conducted late last year by the Austrian polling agency Fessel-GfK. The survey covered seven countries in central and eastern Europe, and its outcomes have only just been published.

The survey showed that Czechs have one of the best linguistic skills among the newly emerging democracies of the former Soviet bloc. It was carried out in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia and Slovakia.

The highest percentage of Russian speakers -- almost 30 percent -- live in neighbouring Slovakia. Which is strange, considering that until 1990, when Russian ceased to be a compulsory subject at schools, the Slovaks and the Czechs -- then still citizens of one state -- had the same conditions and opportunities to learn Russian well.

On the opposite side of the scale, Russian, the most commonly used Slavic language, is spoken by only two percent of Hungarians.

As against 51 percent of Czechs, only about 17 percent of Slovaks can express themselves in German. But this figure is still six percent higher than in Poland and Hungary.

German is spoken by six in every 100 Russians, and by three percent of Romanians, 13 percent of whom speak English.

English is also the preferred choice of 11 percent of Slovaks and Poles, and of one Russian in ten. At the opposite end, English is spoken by only nine percent of the Bulgarians and seven percent of Hungarians.

Czechs, Hungarians and Slovak seem to have no affinity for the French language -- only about seven percent, compared with double that figure in Romania. Only one Czech in 100 speaks Italian or Spanish -- a proportion which is being largely emulated by the rest of the new democracies. 

Please send us your comments

RP Home / Radio Prague in English / Commentary

Radio Prague Internet Team
cr@radio.cz

Radio Prague, Vinohradska 12, 12099 Prague 2, Czech Republic
tel (+4202) 240 94 608 * fax (+4202) 242 182 39
WWW http://www.radio.cz/opinion/