One of the more powerful Czech businessmen is proving to be as elusive as Sir Charles Lytton, otherwise known as the Phantom.



A few years ago, when Milan Urban was CSSD trade and industry minister, a journalist I know paid a visit to the ministry. He spotted the name ‘Vladimir Johanes’ on a door in the minister’s suite, and asked the official if this was the Vladimir Johanes. “Ah, yes”, replied the official with a smirk: “The Pink Panther! He just keeps returning.”

The son of the country’s last communist foreign minister, Vladimir Johanes was born in 1959 and graduated from the law faculty of Charles University in 1982. He then disappeared into the official ranks of the leadership of the Czechoslovak Socialist Union of Youth (SSM), reemerging in 1990 as the head of the Prague office of an American advertising agency called Grey.

Johanes led Grey for thirteen years until his appointment in 2004 to the supervisory boards of CEPS, the operator of the electricity transmission system, and Skoda Praha, the CEZ subsidiary responsible for managing the firm’s EUR 4bn capital expenditure programme. His appearance at the top of both companies coincided with the appointment of Martin Roman as CEO of CEZ.

Johanes remains in both positions to this day, surviving, like Roman, the fall of seven prime ministers and five finance ministers. Both gentlemen were appointed, at least formally, by Milan Urban, and both will no doubt still be in place to welcome Urban back this autumn, after a gap of seven years, as trade and industry minister in a CSSD government.

Johanes, otherwise known as the Pink Panther, is as elusive as Sir Charles Lytton, and certainly as discrete. There are only two official photographs of Johanes. One is from the so-called ‘1000 Leaders of the Czech Republic’, a directory compiled by Karel Muzikar and his ubiquitous Comenius Society.


Sir Charles is seated on the far right.

The other is from CTK’s vast archive of photographs. It is a black and white photo of Johanes beside Bohuslav Chnoupek, the Czechoslovak foreign minister, and other SSM officials, at a gathering in February 1987. In October 1988, Chnoupek, who was considered too reform-minded, was replaced as foreign minister by Johanes’s father, Jaromir.

This 25 year-old picture is the only picture CTK possesses of Johanes, a measure of how camera shy the man is. All the other images of Johanes are unofficial, taken through a long distance telephoto lens by nasty journalists, either showing him on the golf course with Roman or on ‘Lenka’, Johanes’s Pershing 64 motorboat moored in Monte Argentario, with Mirek Topolanek and Urban, that other seasoned Johanes admirer mentioned earlier.


VJ and Milan Urban boarding 'Lenka'.


VJ, Martin Roman and Daniel Benes on the golf course.

The true power of Johanes is hard to estimate. Certainly, he makes every effort to downplay his influence over CEZ’s pharaonic investments. Even so, those Monte Argentario photos must have come as a nasty shock to such a smooth operator, the price perhaps of having to do business with amateurs like Topolanek and Marek Dalik.

Perhaps we shall look back one day, when Johanes and Roman are finally removed as gatekeepers extraordinaire of the state’s energy investments, and see those 2009 Tuscan holiday snaps as the turning point in Johanes’s career, the equivalent of the fabulous chinchilla fur hat and coat in the Denzel Washington classic, ‘American Gangster’.


Chief Inspector Dreyfus:The forces of law and order must be protected (from themselves).

And there again, perhaps we shall not. As with Sir Charles, rumours might abound of Vladimir J’s involvement in various high value heists, but those who would catch him are as harmless as Inspector Clouseau. And those who could catch him were, like Clouseau's demented boss Dreyfus, put in a straitjacket long ago.