In brief
- A Czech justice minister has resigned last week after accepting a $45 million Bitcoin donation from a convicted drug trafficker.
- The opposition ANO party has called for a no-confidence vote in the government, citing its failure to vet the funds.
- The scandal comes months ahead of national elections, with polls showing ANO leading the ruling coalition.
Czech opposition party ANO on Tuesday called for a no-confidence vote in the government following the resignation of Justice Minister Pavel Blazek, amid controversy over a Bitcoin donation from a convicted drug trafficker.
The donation, reportedly worth millions of dollars in Bitcoin, was made to the Czech government in March and has triggered widespread condemnation. Decrypt has contacted government officials for comment.
Blazek resigned Friday after facing political backlash from an alleged Bitcoin donation from Tomas Jirikovsky, who was convicted in 2017 for running Sheep Marketplace, a defunct dark web platform ostensibly involved in drug trafficking.
The donations in Bitcoin were sold for over $45 million at a public auction.
The minister denied any legal wrongdoing with his acceptance of the donation from Jirikovsky, before stepping down.
“This government should have immediately resigned,” Karel Havlicek, deputy chief of the populist ANO party, said on Czech national television, per a report from Reuters.
A no-confidence vote is a formal process in which parliament members decide whether they still support the government or its leader.
Dark web Bitcoin trail
At a press conference a day before he resigned, Blazek said he had “no way to investigate the matter” and wasn’t “interested so many years after the case,” as quoted in a report from Le Monde.
Blazek was referring to Jirikovsky’s arrest in March 2016 and conviction in 2017. After his release in 2021, Jirikovsky sought to recover 1,500 BTC that had been seized by authorities.
Jirikovsky’s own platform, Sheep Marketplace, was shut down after a 2013 heist tied to two Florida men, during which it lost 5,400 BTC.
Details of the donated Bitcoin’s dark web trail were first revealed in an investigative report from the Czech outlet Deník N.
During his trial, authorities reviewed the origins of the seized Bitcoin. Czech media at the time speculated about ties to other dark web markets, though no formal link to the Nucleus Marketplace—a separate platform shut down in 2016—was ever established.
In a separate event in March, a long-dormant wallet associated with Nucleus transferred roughly $77 million in Bitcoin after nearly a decade of inactivity.
The main wallet still holds about $406 million in Bitcoin, according to data tracked by Arkham Intelligence.
Slim majority at risk
Blazek’s departure comes as the governing Together (SPOLU) coalition, which includes ODS, lags behind the opposition at 19% to ANO’s 32%, according to poll data, with the country’s elections slated for October.
Blazek served as a veteran senior official in the centre-right Civic Democratic Party (ODS) of Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala, according to government records.
“A lot of people will probably see Fiala as someone who is at least a suspect of sorts in all of this,” Jiří Pehe, director of New York University Prague, told Czech media platform Radio Prague.
“They will not believe that he, as a close friend and associate of Blažek, didn’t know about the whole affair,” Pehe added.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair
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