A tale of greed

What do Lucie Bílá, a Moravian golf club and CEEI have in common? They all work with Fronk. You all know Lucie Bílá. Golf Klub Austerlitz is what it says, a golf club run by a southern Moravian lawyer called Jiří Kovář who used to work for a prime minister called Václav Klaus (who is a big fan of Lucie Bílá and an even bigger fan of himself). And those of you kind enough to read my blog know that CEEI is a legal document gathering dust in a Cypriot lawyer’s office in Nicosia, dressed up to look like a serious firm specialising in the planning and erection of spent nuclear fuel facilities, 'headquartered' in Bratislava and favoured by ČEZ.

But who or what, I hear you ask, is Fronk? Fronk is a photographer and website designer. Rather a good one actually, with a remarkably diverse client base. He does all the design work for the said golf club. He takes lovely pictures of Lucie Bílá (I am 50). And he has produced a very nice website for the firm specialising in spent nuclear fuel facilities, easy on the eye and simple to understand –like Ms. Bílá you might say.

In 2008, ČEZ commissioned Fronk’s nuclear client to erect its spent nuclear fuel facility at NPP Temelín for lots and lots of money. At the time of the commission, CEEI was registered in Liechtenstein with another lawyer called Marcus Buechel, who prefers Alpine skiing to golf and rather than just work for a prime minister, actually was a prime minister, though of Liechtenstein and only for three months in the early 1990s. CEEI’s managing director at the time of its ČEZ success was Martin Peter, the owner of a PR firm with a client base as diverse as that of Fronk. Peter worked with Helena Vondráčková and also with Europe’s leading manufacturer of spent nuclear fuel casks, the German company GNS and its subsidiary WTI (see my blog Smoke and Mirrors II). A year after pulling in ČEZ as a client, Peter found himself in prison, facing a 12 year sentence for physical assault –or was it blackmail? Never mind, it’s not important.

It all sounds too fabulous for words. And it has the virtue of being true. Today, CEEI is run by the golfing lawyer Kovář, who served as the right hand of the prime minister twenty years ago, before being kicked out of office after his party colleagues accused him of trying to blackmail them. Last year, he ran unsuccessfully for president of the Czech Golf Federation.

Anyway, back to Fronk. The website he has designed for CEEI is nice even if the content is too creative for my tastes –unlike Ms. Bílá you might say. The German company it claims to be in partnership with across the region says that all cooperation with CEEI ended four years ago. CEEI’s company directors are two Cypriot gentlemen called Georgios Georgiou and Vrachimis Skordid, and a certain Rostislav Senjuk, the chairman of a small political party called Soukromníci. Like the president of the south Moravian golf club, Senjuk also ran unsuccessfully for high office recently, in his case for the position of general director of Česká televize.

What a colourful and leisured cast of characters! Of the three officers of the company, one is twiddling his thumbs in prison, another is playing politics and the third, golf. Who actually does the work in CEEI, a.s.?!? I wonder if there is any reader out there who might help me establish whether CEEI, a.s. actually employs anyone at all? I ask because a visit to the Bratislava business address given for CEEI, a.s. on its website reveals fourteen company mailboxes, mostly owned by random Russians resident in Russia, but alas! no CEEI, a.s.

I feel sure that you have all got the point by now and I promise not to mention this subject for at least a month or two. This sorry tale, which is so symptomatic of the Klaus era, does not inspire confidence in the judgement of Daniel Beneš, who commissioned CEEI in 2008 and whose next big commission, now as CEO of ČEZ, will be for two nuclear reactors at NPP Temelín.

We must hope that more care is taken in choosing the contractors for these reactors than was taken in choosing CEEI, evidence of whose actual existence is limited to a golfing lawyer, a handful of electronic documents and a website designed by Lucie Bílá’s favourite photographer Fronk.