The Prague Municipal Court on Thursday ordered law enforcement to take Slovak convicted fraudster Jozef Majsky into pre-trial custody, with Majsky ending up detained. "Majsky appealed against this decision, yet his appeal doesn't have a suspensory effect. That means that Majsky has been escorted to Pankrac prison," added the court spokeswoman Marketa Puci. The Prague Municipal Prosecutor's Office now has 60 days to conduct a so-called pre-trial investigation, with the prosecutor expected to decide within that period whether or not to lodge a proposal to extradite Majsky to Slovakia.
The 73 year old fraudster was a former power-broker who supported several political parties in the 1990s and owned a number of media. Police began to prosecute him in the early 2000s for embezzling the Horizont Slovakia and BMG Invest non-banking companies, which saw many Slovaks lose their lifelong savings.
The entrepreneur spent almost two years in custody, until he was released in August 2004 by a controversial intervention of then-prosecutor general Dobroslav Trnka. He managed to evade justice until the Specialised Criminal Court in October 2015 sentenced him to nine years in jail and, finally, the Supreme Court turned down his appeal against the verdict in July 2020.
Prosecutor Jan Santa of the Special Prosecutor's Office, who had initiated the prosecution of Majsky in Slovakia back in the early 2000s, sees Majsky's detention in Prague "as another step towards a greater degree of lawfulness and justice." Santa added he hopes that the outcome of even subsequent proceedings will be that defendant Majsky will serve nine years in jail. Majsky was found by the Czech police in early August at a psychiatric hospital in Prague.
