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The upper house of the Czech parliament, the Senate, rejected on Friday a financing plan for the purchase of 24 new fighter jets for the Czech Air Force, which is the biggest military deal in Czech history, amounting to nearly 2 billion USD.

The Czech foreign trade in April ended with a deficit of 40 million USD as compared to the 300 million deficit in the same period of 2001. The result is significantly better than expected. Economic analysts had predicted a deficit of around 200 million dollars in April, approximately the same as in March.

The Czech Senate on Friday rejected a law that would almost entirely ban tobacco advertising within two years. The senators opposing the law said they thought the measure was too broad.

The Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman has said the Czech government has been unofficially offered 260 billion CZK, which is around 9 billion USD, for its majority stake in the power utility CEZ.

On June 2, 2002, the ATM networks of 15 Czech banks will be out of operation. Clients will be unable to use their bank cards for payments in shops either. The company MUZO which runs the transaction authorisation system for bank cards will be upgrading its software.

The number of Czech households with an digital ISDN phone line has been growing by hundreds of per cent every year - from 195 at the end of 1997 to more than 80,000 at the end of 2001 and to over 83,000 in April this year.

Czech retail sales on March grew by five percent year-on-year, as compared to 4.2 percent in February while the overall price level remained virtually the same. The Czech Statistical Office said the acceleration was mainly due to surging demand for groceries and petrol, but also clothing and household and gardening products.

Czech and Polish Transport Ministers have signed an intergovernmental agreement on the connection of the Czech D47 motorway with Polish A1. Poland is to build the 50-km part of the A1 motorway to the Czech border by 2008.

An extraordinary general meeting of the Czech power utility CEZ on Monday rejected an energy sector restructuring plan put forth by the Czech cabinet. The plan included an acquisition by the state-owned energy utility CEZ of the government's majority stakes in six of the eight regional electricity distribution companies and minority stakes in the other two. In exchange, the Czech National Property Fund was supposed to acquire a majority in the company CEPS which controls the power transmission system and is currently controlled by CEZ.