Vladimir Dlouhy, the communist turned liberal conservative turned corporate lobbyist turned aspiring head of state now champions moral values in business.



Watch him (and his spectacles) change colour


“I still carry influence with him up there”, said Vladimir Dlouhy, gazing up at St Vitus Cathedral from the garden pavilion beneath Prague Castle that serves as his private office.

“Goodness me!” I said to myself: “Surely he cannot mean with Him?” But then, of course, I realised he was referring to the president, not to the archbishop.

Some five years later, Vladimir Dlouhy is himself a president (of the Czech economic chamber). And like the archbishop, Dlouhy has become, at least in his own eyes (and his own words), a ‘guardian of moral values’ who would have us all forgive his sinful predecessor, Petr Kuzel, and ‘look to the future’ (see President Dlouhy’s interview in Ekonom this week).

It was not always so. There were times when Dlouhy was just another corporate lobbyist, peddling political influence to keep his Audi A8 on the road.

For example, for a brief spell Dlouhy served as an informal, self-appointed go-between to the Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek, and a large American brewer exploring a business opportunity in Ceske Budejovice.

I was an external adviser to the said brewer. For his part, Dlouhy was hoping to win a mandate for his client, Goldman Sachs, in the event that the Topolanek government decided to sell Budejovicky Budvar.

He was also trying to win a mandate for Marek Dalik, the prime minister’s favourite.

Shortly before I visited Dlouhy in his garden pavilion, he had visited me in my office opposite the parliament. It was an enigmatic encounter. He sat down, placed three mobile phones on the table between us, and proceeded to tell me that I was persona non grata with the prime minister. He then gathered up his phones, and left.

I was perplexed. But it all became clear a few days later when the Americans revealed that Dlouhy had been urging them to dump me and to work with New Deal Communications instead (“Dluee says the prime minister thinks you’re a jerk and that we should hire some guy called Daleek. Who the Hell is Daleek?”) New Deal, of course, was the lobbying outfit that Dalik then owned (he cut his links formally to the firm a few weeks ago).

So Dlouhy’s marvellously enigmatic visit to my office had been the equivalent of an officer in the Wehrmacht placing a loaded Luger on the table, and inviting his disgraced fellow officer to do the 'honourable thing'.

Fortunately, the Americans had the good sense to ignore 'Dluee'. I was not fired and Dalik did not get the job. The business opportunity never materialised, Topolanek lost power and the American firm got swallowed up by an even larger brewer.

I tell the story, which has the virtue of being true if nothing else, only to impress upon you how Vladimir Dlouhy has reinvented himself once again. The communist turned liberal conservative turned corporate lobbyist turned aspiring head of state has now morphed into a champion of morality in business.

This is wonderful news, but what, as Erik Best asked on Friday in his analysis of the deterioration in Czech business culture, does it actually mean? Dlouhy is the chairman of the supervisory board of the Czech construction firm PSJ. This week, PSJ announced that it had been awarded a contract to build an airport terminal in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia’s fifth largest city (better known by its Soviet name of Gorky). I wonder how Dlouhy's talk about moral values in business goes down there.

Perhaps Rolls-Royce holds the clue. In mid-2013, Dlouhy was appointed 'international adviser' to the iconic British firm with a large civil nuclear division. Rolls-Royce has been closely cooperating with Rosatom since 2011 and is a part of the Russian-led MIR 1200 consortium.

Could it be that the values Dlouhy will be promoting as president of the economic chamber are Russian business values?