The Czech finance minister is to appoint two 'new' supervisory board members at CEZ. Does this mark the dawn of a new era at the stagnating state utility?




Andrej's man: ANO 2001's Jiri Tyc is also a founding member of Jihocesti tatkove and a nuclear power enthusiast.

One popular joke doing the rounds in Prague these days is that the country's criminal fraud police should be managing CEZ itself, so frequent are its visits to the top floor of the firm’s head office in Prague in the search for more evidence of ‘mismanagement’.

But then along came Andrej Babis to sort CEZ out. The finance minister is renowned for kicking backsides as the builder and absolute owner of the Agrofert conglomerate. Over the last weeks, the representative of the state as majority shareholder has made much of his plans to kick CEZ up the backside too.

Some even dared hope that having a majority shareholder with Babis’s famed business acumen, unlike previous finance ministers who have all been career politicians, might help CEZ drag itself into the 21st Century, and into a fit state to survive the upheavals in European energy markets caused by Germany’s renewable revolution.

The news today that Babis is planning to appoint Jiri Tyc and Vlastimil Jirik to the supervisory board of CEZ will be greeted with mixed feelings. Jiri Tyc is an ANO 2011 member. He is also a middle-ranking nuclear engineer employed at CEZ and a founding member of Jihocesti tatkove, an absurd, industry-funded lobbying outfit made up of CEZ employees which promotes the expansion of the Temelin nuclear power plant. Tyc has spent his entire working life at the plant.

The other ‘new’ board member is actually returning to CEZ after an absence of four years. Vlastimil Jirik served on the supervisory board of CEZ in 2009-2010, at a time when the solar deals that the criminal police are now investigating were being done. Supervisory board votes are not made public so we do not know how individual board members voted on particular decisions.

However, the timing of Jirik’s appointment and early resignation from the board suggests that he might have been a bona fide board member rather than a rubber stamp of the Martin Kocourek variety. Jirik was formally appointed to the board, not by Miroslav Kalousek, but by Eduard Janota, the veteran communist-era finance ministry official who temporarily replaced Miroslav Kalousek as finance minister under the unelected Fischer government. Jirik helped the state to sell some CEZ shares on favourable terms and the supervisory board post was his reward. Just before Kalousek returned to office, in July 2010, Jirik stepped down (after only a year in the job) citing poor health. Could it be that Jirik's illness was more an allergic reaction to Kalousek?

At first sight, it seems that these two appointments are more a gentle pat on CEZ’s back than a hard kick up its corporate backside. Certainly, Jiri Tyc is not a forward-looking appointment. But perhaps Vlastimil Jirik may yet surprise us.