The commission for the construction of the Brno campus of VUT will be investigated by the police

Rector of VUT prof. Ing. Karel Rais, CSc., MBA: "The distance between the contract and the board is enormous."

Brno/Prague - The controversial billion-crown contract for the construction of a new campus of the Brno University of Technology (VUT), which was highlighted by Hospodářské noviny and the iHNed.cz news site on Tuesday, will be investigated by the anti-corruption police. After HN published that Ivo Uhýrek, an employee of the OHL-ŽS company, was involved in the tender documentation on a CD, and his company subsequently won the tender with a bid of 1.12 billion crowns, the police requested the CD with the tender documentation of the contract.
    The school stated today that it stands by the legality of the contract for the construction of a new building worth over a billion crowns. VUT is ready to prove to anyone that the law was not violated, said Treasurer Vladimír Kotek to ČTK today. The winning company also objected to the information from HN.
    HN, however, according to the iHNed.cz website, found that the connection between the school and the company that obtained the billion contract is much closer than just that an employee participated in the tender documentation. Supposedly, Michal Štefl, the chairman of the board and general director of OHL ŽS, directly sits on the school's board of trustees.
    "The distance between the contract and the board is enormous; they could not access the details of the contract," said Rector Karel Rais regarding the suspicion of a conflict of interest. He did not want to speak further about the doubts, as the school would comment in a press release.
    "The board does not issue or organize tenders," added Michal Hašek (CSSD), the South Moravian governor and also a member of the board. Nevertheless, Hašek has already urged the chairman of the board and Brno mayor Roman Onderka (also CSSD) to convene an extraordinary meeting. Štefl would thus ultimately examine whether his company acted transparently and did not have an advantage over competitors, the website reported.
    Challenging the contract poses a problem for the school. The billion construction project is to be funded from European grants, specifically from the Research and Development for Innovations program. "There is serious suspicion and grants should be suspended until the contract is reviewed," said Veronika Ondráčková, deputy director of the National Fund department at the Ministry of Finance, which manages and oversees the flow of European grants. The Ministry of Education, under whose jurisdiction the program falls, has already announced that it will investigate the circumstances of the contract itself, reported the Hospodářské noviny site.

HEXAPLAN INTERNATIONAL spol. s r.o.: New building of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at VUT in Brno