Jarda's legacy

A clever trick of early Czech capitalism was to found two companies with similar names and to use the mix-up this caused to fool business partners or the state. The best-known example of this was Lubomír Soudek's NERO and NERo - two entirely different companies. A decade or two later, the transliteration of Chinese names provided a new opportunity. As a representative of the secured creditor of CEFC Group (Europe) Company a.s., Dušan Palcr of J&T Private Investments B.V. presented a notary with a printout from the Czech commercial registry showing that CEFC Europe's sole shareholder was Shanghai Huaxin Group (Hongkong) Ltd., and he attested that the information was "current, correct and complete." Given the size of the loan in question, Palcr was probably in a position to know, so it is reasonable to accept this ownership information as factual. But who owns CEFC Europe's owner? Everyone assumes that the owner of Shanghai Huaxin Group (Hongkong) Ltd. is CEFC Shanghai, because that's what Jaroslav Tvrdík has been telling us. Yet Jarda has been known to lie.