Zdenek Bakala and Pavel Telicka have a mutual interest in railways: The former as owner of Europe's largest private provider of rail freight services, the latter as the European Commission's point man for the EU-funded rail corridor between the Baltic States, Belarus, Poland and Germany.



The Joker: Zdenek Bakala's plans to take over the world using firms with megalomanic names likes New World Resources and Advanced World Transport have been derailed.

In the same week that NWR, Zdenek Bakala’s corporate vehicle for owning the OKD coal mining business, announced that it would run out of money in just nine short months, the Czech press revealed that the ailing business had paid ANO 2011’s Pavel Telicka and his firm BXL some €2.2 million in the period 2006-2013 for unspecified consulting services.

The news server bne.eu described Zdenek Bakala as the man who pulled off one of the deals of the decade by doing “a leveraged buyout of the hard coal miner, for a reputed €400 million in November 2004, then set about stripping out assets worth around €2 billion, and then flogging off the rest to an eager market that valued the firm at €4.5 billion”.

People might wonder what value Telicka can add to a coal mining firm owned by an highly accomplished asset stripper like Bakala. After all, Telicka has spent his entire career either working as a public official or lobbying them. Today, he is campaigning on ANO 2011's ticket to become the next Czech-nominated EU Commissioner.

The gravy train goes east

The answer is railways. In March 2014, Telicka was reappointed for his third four-year term as the European Commission's European Coordinator of the North Sea-Baltics corridor project, one of the so-called 'priority projects' of the EU's Trans-European Transport Network program, or TEN-T. The North Sea-Baltics corridor aims to build an uninterrupted rail transport corridor from the ports on the Gulf of Finland, passing south through the three Baltic States and North Eastern Poland to Warsaw. In Warsaw it joins the East-West corridor passing through Brest on Belarus's western border with Poland, through Warsaw, Poznan and Berlin, and on to the ports on the North Sea coast.


Follow the red line east at Warsaw for Bakala's AWT Belterminal in Brest.

Telicka's central role in the project, paid for by the European taxpayer (the post is 'unpaid' but he receives a monthly allowance plus 'mission expenses'), is perhaps the most important reason why he was hired by Bakala. Bakala’s business interests include lots of locomotives pulling lot of wagons full of coke and iron ore backwards and forwards across Central Europe, from the German and Polish sea ports, eastwards into Belarus and southwards through Ostrava all the way to the Adriatic.

Bakala's AWT Group (AWT stands for Advanced World Transport –Bakala likes to think big when naming his companies. See here http://www.awt.eu/en) describes itself as the "largest private provider of rail freight services in Europe, transporting commodities such as coal and steel, and components for the automobile industry". In the Czech Republic, it owns the Ostrava-Paskov terminal. AWT’s assets outside the Czech Republic include the Brest Belterminal on Belarus’s western border with Poland. According to
AWT's marketing director speaking at a Polish-Czech economic forum last year, as much as 75% of all cargo transported by sea to the Czech Republic arrives at the German North Sea ports from where it travels through Poland to Ostrava.

You get the point. Zdenek Bakala has a keen business interest in the success of the North Sea-Baltics corridor project, and since 2006, Telicka has been the project's ‘point’ man for the European Commission.
This is the reason why Bakala was so happy to have Pavel Telicka on the NWR board, and why Telicka and his company received over €2.2 million in unspecified consulting fees.