And PORGY is not the nominative plural of PORG




How many PORGs do you need to make a Broadway musical?

The billboards of Prague are endlessly fascinating. Gone is the shiny happy face of our new president assuring us that we are alone no longer. And in its place, we find the shiny happy faces of secondary school children beneath clever little one-liners such as “BOOK is not a deciduous tree” and “NERUDA is not your neighbour”.

The advertisements are promoting a chain of private schools called PORG.

PORG is famous but not for its musicals, alas! It is famous for its Prague director, who is the elder son of the outgoing president, Vaclav Klaus, and for its founder, sponsor and chairman, Martin Roman of CEZ.

Too close an association with either gentleman is not, one would think, an attraction for most parents given the values each has come to represent. Nor can it help attract good teachers.

Vaclav Klaus Jnr., like his parents, actively supported the presidential campaign of his father’s ‘sworn ideological enemy’, Milos Zeman. He took evident pleasure in encouraging people to think that his rival, Karel Schwarzenberg, was a foreigner with a NAZI past.

The swastika and red star daubed onto the PORG secondary school building in Prague over the weekend are presumably a reaction to the school director’s intervention in the presidential campaign, and to the report carried in Saturday’s Lidove noviny that his grandfather, on his maternal side, was Stefan Mistina, who participated in the persecution of Slovak Jews during World War Two (see here).


Roman stands at the back with Palas and Forejt, as Mistina's grandson and son-in-law open another PORG, this time in Ostrava.

Moving swiftly on, the chairman of PORG’s board is Martin Roman, former CEO of CEZ. Roman is famous for many things, including the fact that he is under criminal investigation for fraud.

Other PORG board members include Roman’s close relatives and his personal PR guru for the last decade or more, Milan Hejl, owner of AMI Communications. Perhaps the current billboard campaign was Hejl’s brainwave, a way to distract people from dwelling upon the behaviour of PORG’s director and chairman.

And this gives me an idea for another clever little one-liner for PORG’s advertising campaign:

"THE APPIAN WAY is not a technique for the embezzlement of state assets."