Websites of companies belonging to Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babis were briefly hacked by the group Anonymous, apparently in protest to a new Czech law that allow the government to shut down illegal online gambling websites.
Babis founded a political movement that gained power in 2013, but his businesses have left him open to charges f potential conflicts of interest.
According to Czech media, Anonymous shut down the websites of Babis’s holding company Agrofert and bakery group Penam for a short period. The hacker group has threatened more website attacks and called for the cancellation of a new law that places restrictions on online gambling and allows the Finance Ministry to close sites operating illegally in the Czech Republic
“The Finance Ministry led by Andrej Babis gets almost limitless power to censor the internet. It is time to move against it,” Anonymous said in a video posted on Youtube. The group also demanded the end of a planned online system for monitoring retail sales that the finance ministry is launching at the end of the year.
According to Reuters, Babis has put an emphasis on stopping tax fraud and improving tax collection in the republic. The gambling laws and online sales reporting system are part of that effort.
He told Reuters he had met before with a representative of Anonymous and added he would file a criminal complaint over the attacks.
“We only want to apply rules used by 18 European Union countries already, nobody wants to censor the internet. It is aimed against gambling companies that do not pay taxes,” Babis said.
