PORG is back in the headlines after Martin Roman sacks Vaclav Klaus Junior.



Graffiti in the groves of academe...

Vaclav Klaus Junior, the academic head of PORG, has been unceremoniously dumped by Martin Roman, the private school’s principal benefactor and de facto boss. This brings to an end a business partnership that has lasted some fifteen years.

The cause of the quarrel is not exactly clear, although it is likely to be a dispute over money or politics - in so far as either man is able to separate the two things. What would you expect? It is inconceivable that anything so closely tied to the Roman and Klaus families could ever be about anything else. The great wealth of both families is built entirely on politics. Indeed, there are no better examples of the rewards that Czech state capitalism confers upon its champions.

And yet the school’s marketing material, without a hint of irony, describes PORG as a 'truly independent school: an ivory tower unbuffeted by the gales of politics.' This statement is both ridiculous and untrue. In the last few years, the political gales have hardly stopped buffeting this particular ivory tower.

First, there was the revelation in Blesk that Milos Zeman's daughter Kacenka had left the school after failing her mathematics exam. Then Klaus joined his mother and father in publicly mocking the presidential aspirations of Karel Schwarzenberg. And a few weeks after that, the school building in Prague was daubed with a red star and swastika in a cheeky reference to Mrs Klaus’s family history. And now Klaus has resigned after rowing with one of the family’s most trusted advisors - and investors.

Someone should calculate how much Martin Roman has sunk into the Klaus family. Both sons have been on the Roman payroll for years, one at PORG, the other at CEZ. And the parents? I wonder how much Roman has invested in the careers of Mr and Mrs Klaus since he got his first big break in 2000, as the boss of state-owned Skoda Plzen, acquired by Appian in 2003.

PORG states that its income is made up of a combination of school fees, state subsidies and private donations in cash and in-kind. In 2004, Appian's Skoda Plzen sold its nuclear engineering division, Skoda JS, to the Russian state, in the guise of OMZ. Skoda JS is among the most generous of PORG's donors. It is also among the most popular of CEZ's suppliers. As for in-kind donations, at least those publicly acknowledged by PORG, these include the donation of legal services by Martin Roman’s family lawyer, Radek Pokorny.

'FRAUD není vídeňský psychoanalytik'

PORG claims that this income is spent on paying its teachers and improving school buildings. I am sure it is –after all, what else does a school spend its money on? Well...on billboards actually. Soon after the presidential election campaign ended last year, PORG launched a massive advertising campaign on the streets of Prague and Ostrava. You cannot have missed it. Child models grinning beside a fatuous play on the Czech pronunciation of English words such as ‘BOOK není listnatý strom' and 'WOLKER není skotská whisky'. A faithful reader of mine came up with a much better one: 'FRAUD není vídeňský psychoanalytik'.

Why would a school that is apparently oversubscribed spend millions on an outdoor advertising campaign? Perhaps the campaign hoped to deflect attention from the red star and swastika. Or it might be that PORG’s paymaster is simply vain and wants to waste his money. A more plausible explanation might be that PORG’s billboards helped pay for someone else’s billboards –Milos Zeman’s perhaps.

The Czech weekly Reflex has claimed that Martin Roman owns one third of BIGBOARD, the billboard firm that carried the PORG adverts, with another third owned by Roman Janousek, and the remaining third shared between Fuxa and J&T Banka. If these claims are true, it would explain why PORG ran its fatuous billboard campaign.

In all cases, it is a supreme irony that this self-consciously private school is funded partly by the Czech state, partly by the Russian state, and partly by a man whose wealth is derived from his former sinecures in state-owned companies like CEZ and Skoda Plzen.

If PORG is a beacon of anything, it is of state capitalism. And if the dispute between Roman and Klaus is an indication of something, it is that even state capitalists, once ripped from the public nipple, run out of money.