Respekt: Czech Coal magnate Tykač's Swiss accounts blocked

Prague, March 18 (CTK) - Swiss prosecutors have allegedly blocked bank accounts and gold worth 19 billion crowns to Czech Coal magnate Pavel Tykac over the renewed prosecution of the Czech CS Fondy investment fund fraud case, weekly Respekt writes in its issue out Monday.

Tykac's spokesman Jan Chudomel dismissed it. He told CTK that no property of Tykac was blocked in Switzerland.

Respekt writes that Tykac's possible role in the machinations accompanying the privatisation of the Czech MUS coal mining firm, which the Swiss police have been investigating, is being checked, too.

Tykac bought a stake in the MUS, now renamed to Czech Coal, several years ago and he gained full control over the company in 2011.

Chudomel said he believed the false information was spread in order to prevent the signing of a contract between Czech Coal and the CEZ state-run energy utility on long-term coal deliveries to the Pocerady power plant run by CEZ at the last moment.

The E15 daily writes on its website Monday that CEZ and Czech Coal have finally agreed on the deliveries of brown coal to Pocerady.

Respekt says it received the information on Tykac's blocked property from people involved in the CS Fondy case who requested anonymity.

Weekly Tyden wrote last December that Swiss detectives started to check the origin of the money that Tykac used to pay for his stake in MUS. Chudomel said then he knew nothing of it.

Last summer, a Prague court reopened the halted proceedings of the CS Fondy huge fraud, within which more than one billion crowns disappeared from an investment fund in the late 1990s. Two months ago, an appeals court upheld the verdict saying the proceedings were halted prematurely in 2007 because testimonies of further witnesses may bring new evidence concerning Tykac.

In 1997, 1.23 billion crowns were paid by the CS Fondy to the Umana brokers for shares of a firm that proved to be of no value and the money disappeared in overseas bank accounts. Four members of Umana were sentenced to prison for the fraud.

CS Fondy was then administered by Motoinvest, one of whose owners was Tykac. Tykac claimed that he had nothing to do with the suspicious transaction.

The controversial Motoinvest financial group made very high profits in the 1990s and it is considered one of the symbols of the then "wild privatisation" in the Czech Republic.

Tykac may be also linked to the case of the above mentioned suspicious MUS privatisation from 1999.

In 2011, Swiss prosecutors charged seven former managers of MUS and Appian Group over alleged machinations within the privatisation case. Tykac is not among the seven suspects, but detectives believe he might have been involved in the fraud in which the Czech state was cheated of more than 1.6 billion crowns.

Both Czech and Swiss police have been investigating the case for years. The Swiss blocked property worth about 14 billion crowns and the Czechs blocked property worth 0.8 billion crowns to the suspected managers.

The main proceedings will start in Switzerland in May.

One of the suspects, Czech billionaire Lubos Mekota, unexpectedly died earlier this month at a golf course, probably of heart attack.