The most famous of the young billionaires spawned by CEZ spent ten years accumulating public money. He is now giving much of it back in a burst of private philanthropy. Would it not have made more sense not to have taken the money in the first place?



One of my more devoted readers, a mysterious character of undetermined sex called ‘blue jay’, points out that efforts to expose mismanagement in CEZ are as pointless as ‘trying to drown fish’.

This is true –in the sense that writing about such things leads nowhere. But then neither, typically, do the efforts of the Czech police and public prosecutors.

The forces of law and order might spend several years and a vast amount of public money building up evidence to charge and convict financial criminals, only to have their efforts wiped out by the single stroke of a presidential pen.

The police and the prosecutors must feel as if they are trying to drown fish. But this is no reason to stop trying.

For me, writing about the misuse and abuse of economic and political power is not a means to an end, and certainly not a means to money. I do not dare to hope that much, indeed anything, will change as a result of what I write. But the act of writing and perhaps of reading these blogs seems to me to be a worthwhile activity in itself.

Dancing, conversation and fly fishing are all examples of human activity that lead nowhere. There is no other purpose to dancing or to conversing or to fly fishing than to dance, converse and fly fish. You might spend hours trying to catch a brown trout, and when at last you succeed, you throw it straight back again.

It is the very ‘pointlessness’ of dancing and conversing that makes them such worthy human activities –no animal would see the point. The fact is that most things worth doing are ‘pointless’ in this sense, including writing blogs about greed and dishonesty in public life.

And those of you who do not feel the power of pointlessness might like to watch this 12 minute documentary film about three happy old men fishing on a frozen lake. It is called ‘How to Save a Fish from Drowning’.