Prague/Dolni Brezany, Central Bohemia, April 25 (CTK) – The Prague Archbishopric is constructing a building for the headquarters of the Japanese Rigaku high-tech firm, which cooperates with some scientific and academic centres in the Czech Republic, the bulletin of the local authority has said.
Rigaku manufactures scientific imaging technologies.
The firm will only lease the building, which is its practice in other countries, too.
The project is to be finished in the first three months of next year, the bulletin said and the Archbishopric has confirmed the news.
According to the 2013 law on property restitution, churches are being returned land and real estate worth 75 billion crowns, confiscated from them by the communist regime, and they will be given 59 billion crowns plus inflation in financial compensation for unreturned property during the following 30 years.
Simultaneously, the state gradually ceases the financing of churches.
The Catholic Church partly invests and partly deposits the money it receives in compensation for the unreturned property.
It repairs its historical seats devastated during the decades of state ownership and it starts up business activities in agriculture and forestry.
In Dolni Brezany, which is becoming a domestic scientific and technological cluster along with the nearby municipalities of Hodkovice and Vestec, it has also entered the field of science, though only by providing its property.
An administrative building for Rigaku is being constructed between a local brewery and the HiLase (High average power pulsed LASErs) centre.
The HiLase centre wants to develop laser technologies with breakthrough qualities, to be used in manufacturing.
HiLASE is a part of the scientific infrastructure with the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) centre.
An ELI work centre with the Bivoj “superlaser” with the strongest output in the world is also based in Dolni Brezany.
The InnoCrystal innovation centre in Hodkovice and the Biocev centre of biotechnology and biomedicine, seated in Vestec, are devoted to biotechnological research.
In Dolni Brezany, there is a chateau belonging to the Prague Archbishopric that has been reconstructed into a hotel since last year. It is scheduled to open next year.
The Archbishopric invests 170 million crowns in the four-star hotel with 40 rooms and an adjoining park.
According to the plans, its clientele is to include guests coming to ELI and HiLase.
The Prague Archbishopric, which owns the chateau, is the biggest owner of property in the municipality.
The state confiscated it in 1945 and it was returned to the Archbishopric within the return of property to churches after the 1989 fall of the Communist regime.
($1 = 24.706 crowns)
