The Czech Republic, which joined the criminal proceedings as an aggrieved party only after a long delay, has a ten-day deadline for appealing the verdict.
Switzerland launched the investigation into the Czech MUS privatisation in June 2005 on suspicion of siphoning off money from the company by its management and its laundering in Switzerland. The Swiss have blocked an equivalent of over 12 billion crowns in the relevant accounts.
They asked Prague whether it would join the criminal proceedings, but the Czech authorities failed to answer the question for almost a year.
In November, Prague started seeking ways of re-gaining the lost money.
Czech Prime Minister Petr Necas previously said the possible ways include a civil lawsuit, the accession to the criminal proceedings, a civil lawsuit filed within the criminal proceedings and the invoking of certain articles of the Swiss criminal law.
However, the Czech Republic has other possibilities, Finance Ministry spokesman Ondrej Jakob said.
"Four alternatives for the Czech Republic to join the proceeding as an aggrieved party have been defined. The Swiss court´s decision from this week rejected only one of them," Jakob told CTK via Radek Lezatka, from the ministry.
The ministry will bring a civil action on the basis of the ground material of the state attorney´s office, he added.
The Swiss Federal Court in Bellinzona rejected the Czech application for joining the criminal proceedings on December 19, the server writes, referring to a source of the Swiss daily Le Temps.
According to the court's verdict, "it is not possible that the Czech Republic become a plaintiff" in the MUS case, the server writes.
The Swiss Prosecutor's Office informed Czech authorities about the possibility to join the proceedings in 2006 already and not this September, which some Czech offices claim, the server quotes Le Temps as saying.
Valere Gogniat, the author of the article in the Swiss paper, told the server that he had learnt about the court's verdict from a high-ranking official, well-versed in the proceedings.
The Swiss court should announce the verdict officially next week.
The court in Bellinzona will not start dealing with the case before next April, court spokeswoman Marcia Gregorio said.
In October, six Czech managers, Antonin Kolacek, Lubos Mekota, Marek Cmejla, Oldrich Klimecky, Petr Kraus and Jiri Divis, and Belgian Jacques de Groot were charged with money laundering, a fraud and forging documents in Switzerland.
The six Czech dismissed the Swiss indictment. They said they were ready to prove that the money frozen within criminal proceedings in Switzerland did not originate from the state property or MUS.
The Belgian man, charged in the case, also pleads innocent.
In 1997-1998, MUS shares were bought out by the Investenergy company, which represented Appian Group in the Czech Republic and which finally gained a narrow majority of 50.2 percent in MUS.
In July 1999, the then Czech government of Milos Zeman sold the remaining stake in MUS or 46.29 percent, to Investenergy for 650 million crowns.
The Czech weekly Respekt has written that the Swiss came to the conclusion that the MUS managers had gained both the majority and the remaining state stake in MUS for MUS's money, thus embezzling billions of crowns.
($1=19.644 crowns) Author: CTK
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