Abstract
Two years ago, a political, but mainly legal, shootout broke out between Prague and Brussels over the existence or non-existence of a conflict of interest of Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, especially in connection with the award of public contracts or the provision of subsidies. Andrej Babiš at the time objected to the action of the European Commission (hereinafter the "Commission"), which in his opinion does not have the power to interpret Czech law.
Aware of the autonomy of the two legal orders, namely EU and Czech, a number of experts in EU law were of the opinion that the Commission should not do so without exceeding the powers of a Union body. However, EU Budget Commissioner Johannes Hahn said that in order to protect the European budget and the European taxpayer, the Commission could do anything, including extensively applying the principle of the "effet utile" of EU law.
Nevertheless, or rather precisely because of this, from a legal point of view, there is still no clear answer to the issue of conflict of interest of the Czech Prime Minister, even though several years have passed since the significant tightening of domestic conflict of interest legislation restricting the business of selected public officials. What are the causes of this uncertainty?