Zdenek Bakala’s fortune is almost the same as Lőrincé Mészáros’s, but he is not one of the ten richest in the Czech Republic. The billionaire who supported Telex immigrated to the United States as a teenager and returned home as a successful investor and a major player in the Czech media market.

One of the largest Czech media companies, Economia, is donating EUR 200,000, or approximately HUF 72 million. Telex.hu to launch a news portal, it was announced on Monday. There will be something to donate to: the wealth of the owner of Economia, Zdenek Bakala, was estimated at 18 billion crowns, or 240 billion florins before the crisis. In Hungary, he would be the fourth richest man, but in the Czech Republic there are several billionaires, so in the list of the richest Czechs, the various estimates are only 10-15. place between. Until now, his name has not been very well known in Hungary, he is an even more important player in the Czech economy and public life.

Born in 1961, Bakala, unlike many of his wealthy contemporaries, did not make a fortune fishing in the confused region of Czechoslovakia surrounding regime change. At the age of 19, he emigrated to the United States in 1980, started working for banks after graduating from college, so when Eastern Europe was busy with regime change and Czechoslovakia disintegrated, he built his career in Credit Suisse First Boston. He tried doing business in his homeland in 1994 when he founded his own investment company, Patria Finance; The company has existed since then, managing assets worth almost 1.5 billion euros in pre-crisis times.

Around the turn of the millennium, Bakala’s name was also included in corruption-related cases related to privatization, but it turned out that he was actively lobbying several prominent politicians, in which there is nothing illegal in itself. The privatization of a mining company called OKD is the only one in which an investigation has been launched against it, and this continues a decade and a half after the case.

In 2006, he first realized that there could be business in the media too, when he bought a weekly called Respekt, which gained a great reputation at the time of the regime change, but by then it was hugely profitable. What happened to Index recently was what he was able to experience: when he presented his plans on how to make a profitable and less narrow layer, all the publishers threatened him with dismissal. He didn’t have to come back for a week. Then, in 2008, he took another step, then Economia became his. In addition to Respekt, it is one of the most important publishing houses in the Czech Republic and its most important publication is the business daily Hospodářské Noviny.

He also started donating at that time, and in 2007 founded a foundation named after him. The most important program for this is to be able to admit talented but poor Czech students to foreign universities. But he supports the Vaclav Havel Library’s program to research and document modern Czech history, and he is also one of the largest patrons of the London Design Museum.



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A Czech media group offered Telex a grant of 200,000 euros


hvg.hu
Business

The money is not yet in shape. It can be enforced if Telex and the bidder’s financial and legal experts find out how to do it in a transparent and legal manner.

Telex, the new tab for outbound indexers, could launch in a week or two


hvg.hu
At home

Donations are collected, but this money will only be enough to get you started, according to Veronika Munk, founder and future editor-in-chief of the new tab for outgoing indexers.