Did the management of PORG support the presidential campaign of Milos Zeman with more than just words?

PORG is a group of three private Czech schools in Prague and Ostrava established in 1990. Its principal benefactor and managing chairman is Martin Roman of CEZ.

The PORG name has become more widely known since Blesk revealed last December that Milos Zeman's celebrity daughter, Kacenka, had left the school after failing her math exams.

The celebrity status of PORG itself was assured in January when its academic head, the elder son of Vaclav Klaus, joined his mother and father in publicly mocking the presidential aspirations of Karel Schwarzenberg earlier this year.

And a few weeks later, one of the school buildings in Prague was daubed with a red star and swastika, attracting yet more media attention.

The way the media writes about PORG is one thing; the way PORG writes about itself is quite another. The English version of its marketing material describes PORG as a “truly independent school: an ivory tower unbuffeted by the gales of politics.”

This is nonsense. To begin with, it is a misunderstanding of English usage of the term ‘ivory tower’, which is almost always pejorative. No modern educational institution competing for the money of well-heeled parents of image-conscious teenagers would wish to be described as ‘cut off from the real world’.

And after the interventions of its director in the recent presidential election, the statement is startlingly untrue as well. Thanks to Vaclav Klaus, PORG has been badly buffeted by those political gales.

And lastly, it is inconceivable that anything so closely linked to the Roman and Klaus families could ever be untouched by politics. The wealth of both is built entirely on politics. Indeed, there is no better example of the rewards that state capitalism confers upon those able to play the political system well.

If PORG's management wished to distance the institution from politics, why would it invite the president and his cardboard entourage, together with the regional governor, to the opening of its new school in Ostrava in 2011?


Proof that state capitalism works! Martin Roman and Jaroslav Palas watch father and son open an elite private school in Ostrava in 2011.

Would it not have been more appropriate to have chosen a respected public figure, unstained by a life in politics, to cut the ribbon of a 'truly independent school, an ivory tower unbuffeted by the gales of politics"?

The marketing material points out that PORG’s various incomes (a combination of school fees, state subsidies and private donations in cash and in kind –for example Martin Roman’s personal lawyer, Radek Pokorny, donates legal services, according to PORG’s annual reports) are spent on paying its teachers and improving school buildings.

This statement is redundant. What else would an educational NGO spend its money on: bouquets of flowers and banquets for presidential candidates and their lovely daughters?

Well... on billboards actually. PORG is currently running an advertising campaign on the streets of Prague and Ostrava. You may have seen them. Child models grinning beside a childish play on the Czech pronunciation of English words, such as ‘BOOK neni listnaty strom’ and ‘WOLKER neni skotska whisky’.

These adverts are as odd as the other marketing material mentioned above. Does the average middle-class Czech eleven year old know that Johnnie Walker is a whisky brand, let alone a Scottish whisky brand?

Does the average middle-class eleven year old know that the Czech writer Jiri Wolker, who isn't a Scotch whisky, was a founding member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, I wonder?

Why would an educational NGO spend millions of crowns on an outdoor advertising campaign launched in February and March when most of the parents of the urban teenagers it seeks to attract are skiing in the Dolomites?

Maybe PORG is facing tough competition from other schools owned by other local oligarchs. But surely PORG is oversubscribed -unless perhaps the latest political gales have buffeted the ivory tower so badly that parents are now less eager to place their children under PORG’s care.

Perhaps the campaign seeks to deflect attention from the red star and swastika? Or it might be that PORG’s benefactor and board chairman, Martin Roman, is simply vain, and wants to waste ‘his’ money on promoting ‘his’ PORG.

It is a supreme and sickening irony that this self-consciously 'private school' is funded partly by the state, and partly by Martin Roman, so much of whose wealth is derived from his sinecures in state-owned CEZ, appointments made by the political elite of which he is so integral a part.

Could it be that the management of PORG were supporting the presidential campaign with more than just words? And could it be that PORG’s billboard campaign is actually paying for the billboard campaign of Milos Zeman?

Surely not! And in any case, what difference would it make? It is already clear to all PORGographers that PORG is a beacon, not of political independence and liberal values, but rather of state capitalism and the privileges that such a system grants its undeserving children.