The Russian Ambassador to the Czech Republic accused Prague of trying to force Russia to fork out through real estate litigation

The Czech authorities began administrative and judicial proceedings regarding Russian state real estate in the country only with the goal of forcing Russia to fork out money, Russian Ambassador to Prague Anna Ponomareva said in an interview with RIA Novosti.

“Having cynically stopped recognizing the diplomatic status of our objects in the Czech Republic due to the “absence of diplomats” (whom Prague had previously expelled or forced to leave), administrative and judicial proceedings were launched with only one goal - to force the Russian Federation, as the owner of the objects, and in many cases the land, to fork out as much as possible,” Ponomareva said.

The ambassador recalled that the Czech authorities had previously expelled Russian diplomats en masse, then began to set quotas on the number of Russian diplomatic missions to the minimum possible number, which was then followed by an offensive by the Czech authorities in matters of Russian real estate.

Ponomareva added that the Russian side appealed the court’s decision in the Czech Republic, which rejected the claim of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Goszagranobshchestvo against the freezing of the enterprise’s real estate.

In January, the Prague City Court rejected the claim of the Russian Federal State Unitary Enterprise Goszagranobstvo, which challenged the freezing of specific real estate objects after the company was included in the Czech sanctions list. On September 30, it became known that the Supreme Administrative Court of the Czech Republic rejected the claim of State Foreign Property for a ban on managing Russian property on the territory of the republic.

Previously, the Cabinet of Ministers of the Republic canceled a total of nine decisions of various bodies of socialist Czechoslovakia, adopted in the 1970s and 1980s, on the gratuitous transfer of buildings and land to the USSR for use in diplomatic activities.