ANDREJ BABIS says the political establishment is conspiring to keep him from power. A billionaire agro-industrialist and media mogul, Mr Babis is the frontrunner to become the Czech Republic’s prime minister after next month’s general election. However, on September 6th parliament voted to strip him of immunity from prosecution as an MP, amid fraud allegations from the police. “You won’t frighten me. You won’t stop me. You won’t get rid of me,” the self-styled outsider bellowed from the dais before losing his immunity by 123 votes to just four.

Meanwhile, audio recordings of him speaking coarsely about how, for instance, he might use his newspapers to attack rivals, have been posted anonymously online. There is even a phone app to help shoppers avoid foods produced by Agrofert, Mr Babis’s conglomerate, which has 250 companies and 33,000 employees.

Rivals have taken more formal steps to curb the tycoon’s influence. In January he was obliged to place Agrofert in a trust after parliament banned cabinet officials (he was finance minister at the time) from owning media or more than a quarter of any firm bidding for state contracts or EU subsidies. In May Bohuslav Sobotka, the Social Democratic prime minister whose coalition includes Mr Babis’s ANO party, forced him to quit his ministerial job, citing separate claims of tax fraud. However, the latest controversy, an alleged subsidy fraud, highlights more specific concerns about how Mr Babis uses political power.

At issue is a 50m koruna (€2m) EU subsidy that helped develop a lakeside resort outside Prague. Police allege that in 2007 Mr Babis spun off a subsidiary from Agrofert to gain access to funds earmarked for small businesses. That firm developed the Capi Hnizdo (Stork’s Nest) hotel while temporarily owned by Mr Babis’s two adult children and his now brother-in-law, before returning to the Agrofert fold in 2013. Prosecutors have not so far filed charges. Mr Babis denies all wrongdoing and insists the case is an attempt to derail his campaign. In a country where frustration with the governing class is high, this has worked. Polls show ANO far ahead of the Social Democrats.

The Capi Hnizdo deal prompted the European Commission to request an audit in 2016. In an example of Mr Babis’s many potential conflicts of interest, such auditing was the responsibility of the Czech finance ministry, which Mr Babis ran at the time. Lukas Wagenknecht, a former deputy finance minister under Mr Babis, says the scandal fits a pattern. After leaving the ministry, Mr Wagenknecht became chairman of an NGO that has been looking into Agrofert. As well as the scale of the EU subsidies received, the data also show that many Agrofert subsidiaries have been donors to Mr Babis’s ANO party. Between 2012 and 2016 a group of 14 firms under the Agrofert umbrella that drew nearly 1.4bn koruna in EU subsidies donated about 31m koruna to ANO.

This cycle of cash between public institutions, EU programmes, a private agribusiness and a political party means “the eventual impact of European funds is to promote a single party,” Mr Wagenknecht concludes. But doing anything about all this is unlikely to get any easier if and when Mr Babis becomes prime minister.