Czech Politician Faces Claims of Aiding Secret Police

But now Mr. Babis, 59, a blunt-spoken Slovak food, media and chemicals mogul with a Czech passport and properties in the French Riviera, is being forced to grapple with a murky past. Prague, the Czech capital, is buzzing with talk of secret files code-named “Soldier” and “Eye” that purport to expose him as a Communist-era secret police agent, an allegation he denies.

The center-left Social Democrats scraped together a slim victory in parliamentary elections held last month after a spying and bribery scandal. But by many accounts, the real winners were Mr. Babis and his anti-establishment party, Ano, or Yes. The party’s second-place showing, with about 19 percent of the vote — not far behind the Social Democrats, who had about 20.5 percent — makes it indispensable in creating a coalition government. Mr. Babis, who won a seat in Parliament himself, is being mentioned as a possible prime minister or finance minister.

Yet, in a region where history is close to the surface, Mr. Babis’s dizzying rise has been clouded by allegations from the Nation’s Memory Institute, based in Slovakia, that he worked in the 1980s for the reviled Czechoslovak secret police, the StB. Czechoslovakia split 20 years ago into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Today, Czechs who collaborated with the secret police can be barred from holding public office.

It is a reflection of many Czechs’ ambivalence about their own collaboration with the Communist government that the details of Mr. Babis’s files that emerged during the campaign did not stop his party from doing well. But if he is blocked from joining a future administration or decides to remain on the sidelines, the country could emerge with a minority government, worsening its political instability.

Already, the allegations are unsettling some in Ano’s ranks. In a report published on Tuesday, Ivan Pilny, a senior party figure, threatened to resign if Mr. Babis turned out to have been a secret police agent. “If we are presented with proof that Mr. Babis collaborated with the StB, I would have to leave the party, as that would mean he lied to us,” Mr. Pilny told Mlada Fronta Dnes, a leading Czech news outlet.

According to previously classified documents released by the Nation’s Memory Institute, Mr. Babis was registered as an informant in 1980 and became an agent two years later. His code name was Bures, a common Czechoslovak surname. The files describe how Mr. Babis, who then worked for a state foreign trade company dealing in chemicals, purportedly met with secret police handlers in 1982 at a bar in Bratislava, now the capital of Slovakia. Later, the “Soldier” file says, they met at least 17 times. The “Eye” file lists two reports Mr. Babis is said to have sent to a colleague, without giving details.

In a telephone interview from Prague, Mr. Babis denied the accusations, saying he had been summoned to meet with the secret police at most three times and had never joined their ranks. He said the files were forgeries made by the StB to blackmail him, in part because some of his family members had affronted the government by emigrating.

At the time, he said, the state wanted to import phosphates from Syria and he refused because the materials posed a health hazard, making him a target of official ire. He has taken the Slovak institute to court and demanded that he be removed from the list of collaborators. A hearing is scheduled for January.

“It is nonsense,” Mr. Babis said. “I never signed anything. I was a victim. I never did anything wrong to anyone.”

He added that he was not proud of having been a member of the Communist Party, but that he had joined at his mother’s urging, out of economic pragmatism. “I was young; I did stupid things,” he said, noting that only a minority of Czechoslovaks had the courage to be dissidents. “To get by, you had to cooperate.”

Tomas Bursik, a historian at the archives of the security services in Prague, noted that a large portion of Mr. Babis’s files had been destroyed, and that what remained did not contain any examples of his handwriting or signature. “This all reminds me of a witch hunt,” Mr. Bursik said.