It’s looking suddenly far less likely that J&T will end up being Penta Investment’s landlord in the Florentinum building following reports that the Chinese company CITIC has paid off the debts of CEFC. J&T had seized CEFC’s Czech assets, which it used as collateral for an emergency loan of CZK 11bn. These included the Florentinum building, the Slavia football club and the former Živnobanka building on Na Příkopě in central Prague. J&T was also expected to begin handing over management positions in CEFC that it had occupied after executing the loan. Weirdly, for anyone unused to mixing politics and the private sector, the head of the Czech president’s office Vladimir Mynař felt it necessary to provide commentary on the apparent end of the scuffle, blaming the whole thing on lawyers. “The CITIC Group has definitively taken over all of the assets of CEFC Europe,” he tweeted. Czech president Miloš Zeman took a personal role in getting CEFC to invest in the Czech Republic and seems to have considered its collapse and the fallout from it as something he needed to play a role in solving.
