Czech dailies write in comments on the death of the richest Czech Petr Kellner about the uncertainty and issues that now surround the future of his investment company PPF and its business and political ties. With the exception of situations such as the current pandemic, the PPF Group has a greater influence on the life and finances of the average Czech than the government and the entire executive, says Petr Honzejk from Hospodářské noviny (HN). Kellner died in a helicopter accident in the Alaskan mountains on Saturday.
According to HN, Kellner’s group is almost ubiquitous. “We call with PPF, we connect to the Internet with PPF, we pay for highways with PPF, we look at what PPF considers suitable, we borrow from PPF, we save money with PPF,” the daily said.
The editor-in-chief of Mladá fronta Dnes (MfD), Jaroslav Plesl, writes on the daily’s opinion page about Kellner as a man who soon realized that he needed maximum sobriety in judgment, consistency and good relations with the political elite. Kellner was tough and, despite his personal closeness, built up a considerable influence in the Czech Republic, he said. “The threads from his Dejvice office have stretched and continue to stretch into many areas of economic, public and cultural life. At the same time, Kellner has often personally decided which thread and where it will be stretched. Now someone else will have to do it,” he said.
According to Plesl, PPF needs a good brain at its head, similar to Kellner’s. “And it will be difficult. It is not a classic corporation, although it is formally similar in many respects. It is also possible that the golden age of his company has passed with Petr Kellner, but it is certainly premature to pass this court,” he added.
In recent years, nothing significant has happened here without Kellner’s participation or possible consent, writes Martin Zvěřina in the column on the front page of LN. According to him, this is not a conspiracy theory, but simple mathematics, because PPF plays the first violin in many strategic fields. “Can the company, now without a boss, exert its influence just as discreetly? Will it go the same way? And will it be at the head of a new strategist at all? We don’t know any of that,” he said.
According to Honzejek from HN, Kellner was the personified proof of how closely business in the Czech Republic is connected with politics. “Kellner’s policy was behind the scenes. He could count on a supportive president and not a hostile prime minister, which was enough for him. It is an exaggeration to say that while (Prime Minister Andrej) Babiš felt like the director of the state and (President Miloš) Zeman as the ruler of the Czech Republic, Kellner was its owner, “wrote HN.
Kellner paid fundamental tax levies elsewhere than in the Czech Republic and did not feel a deeper connection with his native lump, Petr Kamberský writes on the opinion page of LN. According to him, Kellner gave for good purposes an incomparably less than, for example, Bill Gates, who is only six times richer. “I didn’t worry too much about the task of making Earth, or at least my homeland, a better place to live,” Kellner said, according to the commentator. On the contrary, Lukáš Jelínek wrote in a column in the daily Právo that Kellner realized that the maturity and prosperity of the whole society was important. “Wealth serves a wise man, he commands a foolish one,” Seneca said. Petr Kellner was one of the first, Jelínek concluded in Práva.
Source: CTK
