7 Votes Saved Czech Government from Being Ousted Over Bitcoin-Related Scandal

The Czech coalition government survived the no-confidence vote on Wednesday, with fewer than half of the parliamentarians voting ‘aye’. This all began with a Bitcoin scandal.

After two days of discussions in the Czech lower house of Parliament, 94 officials from the opposition party voted in favor of forcing out the government, the AP reported. However, for that to happen, the opposition needed 101 out of the 200 seats.

Notably, this is not the first such motion over the past four years. It’s the fourth since this four-party coalition government took leadership.

Moreover, the next parliamentary election is set for early October, with the opposition likely to win.

Earlier this year, Justice Minister Pavel Blažek accepted a large donation in BTC, which he sold for about $45.8 million in March. In May, the opposition raised concerns over the source of the donation, and by the end of the month, Blažek resigned.

The main opposition centrist ANO (YES) movement, with billionaire Andrej Babiš at the helm, requested a vote of no-confidence, looking to oust the current government.

Subsequently, Eva Decroix, deputy chair of the Civic Democratic Party, has been appointed as the country’s new Minister of Justice.

In March 2025, a lawyer representing Tomas Jirikovsky, a convicted criminal, reportedly approached Blažek, saying that the client would donate 30% of his BTC stash to the ministry.

Before his arrest, Jirikovsky had operated the Sheep Marketplace. In 2017, he went to prison for embezzlement, drug trafficking, and illegal trading of weapons. Police confiscated his wallet containing BTC but returned it after his release in 2021.

The opposition party raised concerns over the origin of this donated BTC, since Blažek did not do any checks. But Blažek denied knowledge of wrongdoing. “I have no way to investigate the matter, and I wasn’t interested so many years after the case,” he said. Blažek also claimed that courts had not proven that the BTC came from criminal activity.

During the trial, the court suspected that the coins came from Nucleus, a dark web marketplace that reportedly shut its doors the day after Jirikovsky’s arrest.

Furthermore, BTC market monitors noted that a portion of the Nucleus-linked BTC, dormant since 2016, moved to new wallets in March.

Jirikovsky claimed that he got to keep the BTC because he had obtained it legally. Blažek claimed he hadn’t made any promises in return for the donation.

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