Prague, Dec 7 (CTK) – The number of sponsors and partners of Prague Castle, the presidential seat, has been rising under the era of President Milos Zeman who was inaugurated in March 2013, daily Hospodarske noviny (HN) writes yesterday.
It says Prague Castle makes up a significant chapter of the state budget. In 2013, when Zeman assumed office, the budget of the Castle was 334 million crowns and since then it has been constantly rising. Next year, it is to get 458 million crowns from the state, HN says.
At the same time, another business, sponsorship, has been thriving at the Castle. Under Zeman´s presidency, many new partners of the Prague Castle Administration, a subsidised organisation of the Presidential Office that is in charge of staging cultural events as well as the operation and maintenance of the Castle complex, emerged, HN writes.
Apart from the Krusovice brewery, with which Prague Castle has cooperated since the 1990s and the contract is valid until 2017, further firms have signed exclusive contracts with the Castle´s administration in the past two years.
The Huawei Technologies Chinese producer of mobile phones became its partner in April 2014. It delivered 100 phones to the office phones for one million crowns in total.
The Czech dealer of the Land Rover and Jaguar British car maker agreed on cooperation in May 2015. Since then he has been lending four cars to Zeman´s office that are always replaced after covering 15,000 km.
It is quite interesting that this year, Prague Castle chose the Mafra media group, owned by Finance Minister Andrej Babis´s concern, as its main media partner, in particular Mafra´s dailies Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) and Metro, while the public Czech Television (CT) and Czech Radio remain “rank-and-file” media partners, HN writes.
At the same time, Hynek Kmonicek, head of Zeman´s foreign section, has become a regular external commentator of MfD, it adds.
Moreover, the Bohemia Sekt wine producer has been an exclusive supplier of wine and sparkling wine and Dallmayr has delivered coffee and tea to the Castle since the summer.
The paper writes that most companies are highly interested in cooperation with Prague Castle since it helps them promote their trademarks.
“Partnership with prestigious institutions, such as Prague Castle and National Theatre, is part of our marketing communication,” Ondrej Beranek, director of Bohemia Sekt, told HN.
As far as Huawei is concerned, the firm welcomes most of all the opportunity to stage its events in the Castle complex for advantageous prices.
“We have held a meeting of our 500 dealers from the whole Central and Eastern Europe in the Spanish Hall at the Castle recently,” Huawei Technologies marketing manager Tomas Broucek told HN.
The paper, which has the contracts with particular companies available, writes that in the case of the Krusovice brewery, Prague Castle pledged to enable it organise its social events for the cost price that would not exceed 300,000 crowns, while the brewery pays about 720,000 crowns to the Prague Castle Administration a year.
In exchange for sponsors´ gifts, Prague Castle guarantees to promote the partner firms´ logos at the entries to its permanent displays and temporary exhibitions and the firms also annually receive a certain number of free tickets to exhibitions and the Castle interiors, HN writes.
Zeman´s spokesman Jiri Ovcacek points out that not Zeman alone, but administration director Ivo Velisek, in cooperation with Presidential Office head Vratislav Mynar, deals with new sponsors.
However, HN asks why exactly Prague Castle, which profits from tourists the most and receives the highest sum from the state budget out of all landmarks, needs so many sponsors.
“We have decided to sign the contracts because the firms submitted their offers that we took into consideration and assessed as contributing. We are actively seeking partners like many other cultural institutions. We appreciate the cooperation as of a high quality, productive and advantageous. Our partners are companies with a great credit that operate worldwide,” Prague Castle Administration spokesman David Sebek answered the HN´s question.
($1=24.802 crowns)
