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The European Commission is taking the Czech Republic to court over a contract for military transport planes. The Commission says Prague breached competition rules by purchasing four CASA planes worth EUR 130-million without launching an EU-wide tender. The purchase was approved last year by a Czech government headed by Mirek Topolánek. The Czech antitrust agency, meanwhile, is investigating the awarding of a contract to the company Omnipol to service the CASA planes, which also took place without a tender.

Speaking ahead of a European Union summit on economic and budgetary issues planned for the end of next week, the Czech prime minister, Petr Nečas, said on Friday that he and the country’s president, Václav Klaus, shared very similar views in that area. Mr Nečas said after talks with the president at Prague Castle that the Czech government would welcome all steps aimed at getting EU members to reduce their budget deficits. However, Prague does not agree with steps to limit national sovereignty by, for instance, making governments submit draft budgets to Brussels before sending them to national parliaments, he said.

An investigation into Czech government spending linked to its six month presidency of the European Union at the start of 2009 has been launched by Finance Ministry inspectors according to the business daily Hospodářske noviny. The inspectors will check for waste from the more than 1.0 billion crown bill for the six month Czech stint at the head of the EU. The period under scrutiny runs from 2007 until 2009, when current government minister Alexandr Vondra was in the cabinet as European Affairs minister. Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek has denied the probe is connected to a highly publicised rift between himself and Mr. Vondra, who now heads the Ministry of Defence.

The Czech and Hungarian prime ministers, Petr Nečas and Viktor Orbán met in Prague on Wednesday and discussed primarily issues of the EU, which Hungary will preside over in the first half of 2011. Regarding budgetary regulations that the union wants to introduce in order to increase fiscal responsibility, Mr Nečas said the countries agree that they are opposed to their budgets being dictated by Brussels and for national governments to merely intermediate instructions from EU bodies. He also said that neither country wants to see their EU membership fees increase to more than 1% of the GDP. The EU is currently discussing how to raise its budget for the years 2014 to 2020.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is to arrive in Prague on Wednesday for a brief working visit. His talks with his Czech counterpart Petr Nečas are expected to focus on bilateral relations, Hungary’s upcoming EU presidency in the first half of 2011 and the two country’s positions regarding the proposed EU budgetary regulations aimed at increasing fiscal responsibility within the alliance. The Hungarian prime minister will hold talks in Prague just two days after a visit by the Slovak Prime Minister Iveta Radičová, which covered similar ground.

President Václav Klaus has called for the dismantling or radical restructuring of the International Monetary Fund. Speaking at a conference in Prague, the Czech president, a former liberal economist, said the IMF was “a barbaric relic from the Keynesian and fixed-exchange rate era” and pointed out that it was not answerable to anyone for its activities. Mr. Klaus, who is perceived as a staunch Eurosceptic, also criticized the European single currency, saying that while the euro would survive its current crisis, Euro-zone members would inevitably pay a very high price for it.

The Slovak Prime Minister, Iveta Radičová, is in Prague for talks with Czech officials. Speaking to reporters after meeting with her Czech counterpart Petr Nečas Monday morning, Ms. Radičová said that both countries were in favour of initiating penalties against EU countries that violate the union’s budgetary regulations, and they agreed that the EU should make its criteria for reviewing budget deficits more objective. The European Commission proposed harsher penalties for violations of budget regulations at the end of September, however member states have not been unified in their support. The two prime ministers did say that their stances towards the EU’s new budgetary regulations differed slightly as Slovakia, unlike the Czech Republic, is part of the eurozone.

Working hours in the Czech Republic are the third longest in the European Union, according to the daily Právo. Citing the results of an international survey, the paper puts the average work week for Czechs at 42.9 hours, with one in four employees saying they work from 7.30 a.m. to 6 p.m. The survey, which maps key changes in employment over the last 50 years, suggests that two fifths of employees do not leave the office for lunch breaks and devote an average of 42 minutes to their work in the evenings.

The recently appointed governor of the Czech National Bank, Miroslav Singer, says the creation of new pan-European Union financial regulators is not an appropriate response to the financial crisis. Mr Singer made the comments at Prague Castle on Wednesday after talks with Czech President Václav Klaus, with whom he is in accord on this matter. The central bank head said care should be taken that the Czech Republic’s stable financial sector should not get into trouble because it is wrongly regulated or because decisions were being made for which Prague was not responsible. Pan-EU regulators are set to begin exercising greater control over the bloc’s financial markets in January.

A survey carried out by the polling agency STEM suggests that 70% of Czechs are opposed to adopting the common European currency, the lowest level of support in the last five years. STEM says it believes the numbers are influenced by recent reports that the stability of the euro has been jeopardised by the indebtedness of certain EU states. 48% of respondents said they believed the European Union itself was going in the right direction, and 51% of those were in favour of adopting the euro.