Who planned the OKD scam?

12.10.2015 - EB

Zdeněk Bakala doesn't talk to the media much, but when he does, he really knows how to say things that come back to haunt him later. Most famous is the promise from Dec. 2004 to sell OKD's apartments to the tenants, and not far behind in notoriety is the zinger in Forbes from July 2013 about how OKD represents less than 10% of his assets and doesn't complicate his life. These could now potentially pale in comparison to his admission on April 3, 2014, that he was involved in the 2004 privatization of OKD from the very beginning. Why is this significant? Because the defendants in the OKD trial claimed on Fri. that Bohuslav Sobotka and Milan Urban knew that the appraisals of OKD didn't include stakes in 32 companies, resulting in a price that was billions below the real value. Either they were incredibly incompetent, or incredibly corrupt. Either way, someone had to structure the deal, and Bakala was the dealmaker among the lot.

Glossary of difficult words

scam - a dishonest scheme; a fraud;

to come back to haunt someone - for the consequences of a bad decision to affect one negatively later;

zinger - a striking or amusing remark;

to pale in comparison - to seem lacking in importance or quality compared to something else;

lot - a particular group, collection or set of people or things.



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