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Wednesday, April 26, 2000
Police officials say they're not shooting themselves in the foot By Frantisek Bouc The contract was awarded to Ceska zbrojovka Uhersky Brod (CZ), which will provide 46,000 pistols to the police over the course of four or five years. The Cabinet used for the first time a new amendment to the public tender law approved by Parliament in February. The law allows the government to award a contract to a company without calling a public tender if the company guarantees a pre-determined level of quality. The legislation was enacted to quicken the process of selecting suppliers. Interior Ministry spokesman Milan Kriz said that the government tried three times over the course of five years to award a weapons contract for Prague police. He said that the attempts were unsuccessful because under the previous law, the government had to have at least two bidders qualify for the tender, and the government was never able to find more than one. Staying home Former Interior Minister Vaclav Grulich said he wanted the contract to go to a Czech company, and in his last act as minister before he resigned April 4, he pushed a proposal through the Cabinet to cancel the fourth tender and give the order to CZ. Grulich wouldn't say whether or not CZ had been a company that qualified for a contract in any of the three unsuccessful tenders. "It would be wrong to ignore a Czech factory and choose instead some newly established foreign factory," Grulich said. "[CZ] was threatened with laying off some 500 employees in a couple of months. Meanwhile, its weapons are being used even in the United States. ... It wouldn't be logical that we buy [pistols] from someone else." CZ spokesman Jiri Frenzl said that the state order will save about 250 jobs at both CZ and its local suppliers. The Interior Ministry's Kriz said that the International Monetary Fund/World Bank summit in Prague in September was a key factor in Grulich's last-minute decision. "It's no secret that some bigger disturbances during the IMF summit are to be expected, and the police must be ready to handle the situation," Kriz said. "Rearming policemen [assigned to duty in Prague during the summit] is an important issue in the overall preparations." Shots fired The Czech police department has waited for new firearms since 1995, when Interior Ministry officials issued a report stating that about 90 percent of the guns used by local policemen were not safe. The report specified incidents in which pistols fired on their own, even while holstered, and had injured several people -- one fatally. After the report was published, the Police Presidium, the governing body of the Czech police department, ordered that police officers were not to keep their pistols loaded and that the pistols would be replaced. Ironically, the pistols cited in the report were made by CZ. Police Presidium spokeswoman Ivana Zelenakova said, however, that there had not been a problem in more than a year and a half and that the new weapons were of much higher quality. She also said that because CZ signed an agreement guaranteeing the quality of the pistols, the government would be able to return them if there were problems. CZ technical director Josef Skrasek said the pistol his company will manufacture for the police is the CZ 75 D Compact 9mm luger -- the same pistol the company offered to the government in the three unsuccessful tenders in which it failed to qualify. He said, however, that the current version of the pistol has been modified and is now up to the standards specified in its contract with the government. Kriz said that experts from the Ministry of Defense will inspect and test each pistol to see if it meets the preset standard. The first 15,000 pistols are to be delivered to the police this year, and the whole contract is expected to be completed within four or five years. Last year CZ sustained a loss of 49 million Kc on a total turnover of 972 million Kc. In the first quarter of this year, however, CZ posted sales of 258 million Kc, up 10 percent from the previous year. Profits reached 25 million Kc. CZ Chief Executive Officer and board vice chairman Jiri Martinec said he expects a profit of about 45 million Kc on 1.2 billion Kc in sales this year. CZ exports account for about 85 percent of the company's production. Exports go to about 80 countries. CZ won a tender for arming the Turkish police in the early 1990s and also a tender for supplying the Egyptian police in 1999. Josef Jares, president of the CZ's U.S.-based subsidiary CZ-USA, said that the company expects revenues of 300 million Kc this year through sales in the United States. Frantisek Bouc's e-mail address is fbouc@praguepost.cz
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