But who is Pontius Pilate?




An ageing Czech rock chick posing in front of a giant reproduction of Reynek’s Nativity scene. This is truly authentic 'Fuxa-man-style'.

With the city ban on large billboards due to come into force this Wednesday, and with Prague’s municipal elections almost upon us, Bigboard launched its third desperate offensive against TOP 09 today, in an effort to persuade voters not to return its mayor, Tomas Hudecek, to power.

In a full page advertisement in the business daily, Hospodarske noviny, the managing director of BigBoard, Richard Fuxa, calls upon TOP 09’s chairman, Karel Schwarzenberg, to drop his ‘blind support’ of the 35 year old Tomas Hudecek and his ‘mafia-like methods’.

BigBoard is using the 21st century equivalent of a hilltop crucifixion to eliminate the young mayor: an outdoor billboard campaign along the city’s ring roads accusing Hudecek of blasphemy, in this case the blasphemy of challenging the self-proclaimed authority over Prague city hall of an opaque financial group from Slovakia.

The city’s decision to ban all large format billboards as of October 1st will gradually wipe out BigBoard’s already declining profits. The billboards will not disappear overnight: the city will simply not renew its rental contracts with billboard firms using the larger formats, which means that the revenue from them will wither over time.

It is J&T, not Richard Fuxa or SPVR (the proxy industry association controlled by J&T that is running the Hudecek campaign), that ordered and is paying for Hudecek’s ‘crucifixion by billboard’. Richard Fuxa is merely the poster boy. His great appetite for publicity should not be allowed to fool you into thinking he is in control. Fuxa holds a minority stake in the firm, at least according to the company’s best knowledge (see its 2013 Annual Report here). The overwhelming majority is held by J&T through Richard Flimel of JoJ Media House.


Is this Pontius Pilate? Richard Flimel, J&T's man in BigBoard and SPVR.

J&T does not wish to be seen to be the owner of BigBoard. Nor does it wish to be seen to be the owner of 119 original Alfons Mucha posters, acquired from the tennis player Ivan Lendl for $3.5 million US in 2011/12, or of 80 Bohuslav Reynek graphics, currently on display in the Prague National Gallery.

But what J&T wants hardly matters. What counts is that an opaque financial investor, using God knows whose money, is abusing its dominant share of Prague billboard market to smear the city’s elected mayor in the middle of an election campaign.

Recall the $3.3 million US fine imposed by the European Commission on J&T’s EPH in 2012 for blocking a competition probe into CEZ and EPH by destroying emails. J&T’s Daniel Kretinsky deleted the contents of his laptop ‘just-in-time’ because, he said, it contained details of J&T’s private banking clients, and he had wanted to protect their right to secrecy. These clients are said to include Czech politicians and state managers, such as the former Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek, who now works for EPH, and Martin Roman.

Richard Fuxa and his friends at J&T are not known for their subtlety. The billboard campaign against Tomas Hudecek is bombastic in the extreme, just like BigBoard’s promotion of the Lendl Mucha exhibition in 2013 (the floor of the exhibition hall in the city-owned Obecni dum was covered in astroturf).

The razzmatazz around the Bohuslav Reynek launch earlier this year involved enlisting the head of the Roman Catholic church in Prague in a re-enactment of the crucifixion, with Fuxa (in a black leather jacket) and a bearded Christ (in white robes) taking it in turns to carry the full size wooden cross down to Klarov from the cathedral (if the bearded fellow was Christ, then who was Fuxa supposed to be, the good or the bad thief who were crucified with Christ?)

J&T efforts to crucify Tomas Hudecek is no less bombastic, an insult to our common and our aesthetic senses.