Did Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala say he was glad that the media "almost ignored" his omission of a $1 million investment in his asset declaration and claim to have concealed all his funds in a location beyond the reach of even top investigative journalists? No, that's not true: Fiala did not make that statement, and the audio in the video, which originated from his Instagram, was manipulated.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok on February 1, 2024. It opened with a voice (translated from Czech to English by Lead Stories staff) saying:
I am glad that my affair about the forgotten million in the cooperative savings bank was literally ignored in the media and was thus beautifully forgotten. However, I had to think about where to hide my hard-earned money, naturally in dollars. After a lot of brainstorming, I finally came up with a great hiding place that even Janek Kroupa could not dig up anything on me anymore.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Fri Feb 2 10:48:25 2024 UTC)
The voice in the video was manipulated, as is evident from the noticeable lack of synchronization between lip movement and sound. A post (archived here) on Instagram from the official account of the Czech prime minister was used to create this video.
The post on Instagram features a video of Fiala on January 29, 2024, during the reopening of the Vysocina Arena (archived here), a cross-country skiing facility in the eastern part of the Czech Republic set to host the biathlon world championships in February. The government office's statement on the visit can be found in the archived document here.
The Government Office's press department told Lead Stories via email on February 2, 2024, that the video on TikTok featuring the prime minister is fabricated. The statement emphasized that Fiala does not use TikTok, as advised by the Czech National Agency for Cyber and Information Security.
Janek Kroupa (archived here), referenced in the manipulated audio, serves as a Czech investigative journalist, presently employed by the Seznam Zpravy news website. Kroupa initially reported that Fiala omitted to declare assets amounting to nearly 1 million koruna ($43,188) in a cooperative savings bank in January 2024 (archived here). Fiala said he was unaware that an account in a cooperative savings bank needed to be included in the asset declaration, unlike a typical banking account.
