As bankers, policymakers and pundits packed their bags in readiness to travel to Prague for the IMF/World Bank conference, the Czech Republic's most (in)famous Financier was making no such arrangements. Viktor Kozeny, aka the pirate of Prague or the bouncing Czech, will be 5,000 miles away, sitting out proceedings in the comfort of his Bahamas home.
| Kozeny: prodigal's return? | ||||||
For those who may have forgotten Kozeny, he is best known as the man responsible for both the success and discrediting of the privatization programme undertaken by Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s. His Harvard funds became the talk of the town when in 1991 they hit TV screens and billboards, promising investors a fairytale return on the privatization vouchers available to each voting citizen - a 1,000% profit was guaranteed within a year and a day.
Good to its word, "the fund with the American name" yielded more than 10 times up-side for its shareholders.