Watching the Detectives
The police are looking for fraud in all the right places in CEZ...
Jana Klimova, the lady Martin Roman called ‘unbearable and obsessive’, carries the satisfying news in Mlada fronta dnes today that the Czech police have opened investigations into three transactions by CEZ, as well as into the firm’s use of its daughter company, Skoda Praha, to negotiate contracts on its behalf.
Last week, I wrote about Skoda Praha Invest’s contract with Alstom to supply, at a cost of 400 million euro, a boiler for CEZ’s Ledvice power plant in late 2007 (see ‘Boilerman’). As the deal was being closed, a then executive director of Skoda Praha Invest, Radek Bencik, left the firm for Alstom Brno and the very division in the French firm that would supply the Ledvice boiler (he actually left at the end of September 2007 and the deal was signed in October 2007). And five years later, the boiler was still not in operation.
I do not know if the detectives are looking into this particular contract. But if not, perhaps they should be, given the unfortunate timing, both of Bencik’s arrival in Alstom and of the boiler in Ledvice.
As for the three transactions that the police are apparently now examining, I have written at length about one of them. This is the decision by Daniel Benes in 2008, as the then head of procurement at CEZ, to award the contract to build a temporary storage facility for spent nuclear fuel at Temelin to an unknown firm registered in Liechtenstein and managed by a founding member and former first deputy chairman of ODS.
And now that this particular transaction has finally attracted the attention of the police, readers may find the full background to the decision less tedious (see ‘Nuclear business is still business’).
Mlada fronta dnes also reveals that the police are examining the sale to EPH of CEZ’s share in the German coalmine, MIBRAG, for substantially less than CEZ acquired it for. Incidentally, it was CEZ's favourite advisory firm, Deloitte, that did the valuation. If readers are interested in understanding why CEZ would sell its share in MIBRAG to its competitor at such a friendly price, I suppose you might ask Deloitte. Or you may find the full explanation here.
Jana Klimova, the lady Martin Roman called ‘unbearable and obsessive’, carries the satisfying news in Mlada fronta dnes today that the Czech police have opened investigations into three transactions by CEZ, as well as into the firm’s use of its daughter company, Skoda Praha, to negotiate contracts on its behalf.
Last week, I wrote about Skoda Praha Invest’s contract with Alstom to supply, at a cost of 400 million euro, a boiler for CEZ’s Ledvice power plant in late 2007 (see ‘Boilerman’). As the deal was being closed, a then executive director of Skoda Praha Invest, Radek Bencik, left the firm for Alstom Brno and the very division in the French firm that would supply the Ledvice boiler (he actually left at the end of September 2007 and the deal was signed in October 2007). And five years later, the boiler was still not in operation.
I do not know if the detectives are looking into this particular contract. But if not, perhaps they should be, given the unfortunate timing, both of Bencik’s arrival in Alstom and of the boiler in Ledvice.
As for the three transactions that the police are apparently now examining, I have written at length about one of them. This is the decision by Daniel Benes in 2008, as the then head of procurement at CEZ, to award the contract to build a temporary storage facility for spent nuclear fuel at Temelin to an unknown firm registered in Liechtenstein and managed by a founding member and former first deputy chairman of ODS.
And now that this particular transaction has finally attracted the attention of the police, readers may find the full background to the decision less tedious (see ‘Nuclear business is still business’).
Mlada fronta dnes also reveals that the police are examining the sale to EPH of CEZ’s share in the German coalmine, MIBRAG, for substantially less than CEZ acquired it for. Incidentally, it was CEZ's favourite advisory firm, Deloitte, that did the valuation. If readers are interested in understanding why CEZ would sell its share in MIBRAG to its competitor at such a friendly price, I suppose you might ask Deloitte. Or you may find the full explanation here.