Prague, March 23 (CTK) – The Czech-Afghan Chamber of Commerce was considered a promising project when it was ceremonially established in 2005, but it has resulted in a failure, generating debts worth of millions of crowns that still remain uncovered, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) wrote on Thursday.
In June 2005, the newly established chamber staged a festive meeting in the Senate, the upper house of parliament, with Afghan prime minister Hedayat Amin Arsala and Czech Senate deputy chairman Petr Pithart among the speakers.
The Afghan delegation of influential personalities then also met Czech PM Jiri Paroubek and president Vaclav Klaus.
It seemed that the Czech-Afghan Chamber, represented by Afghani Fawad Nadri and Czech Daniel Soural, was opening a path to hundreds of millions worth of contracts for Czech companies, MfD writes.
At present, however, the chamber faces ten distraints worth millions of crowns, including four million it owes for hiring the Senate premises for the festive event from 2005, the daily writes.
The distrainers have been unsuccessful, however, because the chamber is an empty box without any property and with no one responsible for its commitments, the paper writes.
Nadri still presents himself as the Czech-Afghan Chamber president. He can be often seen side by side with President Milos Zeman or the former first lady, Dagmar Havlova, the daily writes.
In recent years, he connected his Afghan business deals with companies such as Zito 44, which he owns with Czech pop singer Daniel Landa.
A couple of years ago, he produced the film Lida Baarova, about an internationally-renowned Czech-born wartime film star, which gained a record high 15-million-crown subsidy from the state, the daily writes.
Nadri says Soural, the chamber’s Czech co-founder, is a fraudster who is to blame for the chamber’s debts and who has ended in prison for another crime now.
The chamber owes more than four million crowns to Imex Group, an armament company that was to supply thousands of pistols and ammunition to the Afghan security forces.
Imex paid hundreds of thousands of crowns to the chamber for future consultations and information. However, the Czech Foreign Ministry banned the deal at the very beginning. The Chamber never returned the money to IMEX, and its debt has considerably swollen since, MfD writes.
Nadri remains active, though Czech ministries have distanced themselves from him. His cooperation with Landa have attracted media’s attention. Landa nicknames Nadri “Freki the Wolf” and accompanies him to Afghanistan where Landa negotiates with local officials in the name of the Czech Republic, the paper writes.
Apart from Zito 44, they have founded another firm, Maccius, with the aim to gather money for their ARIA Boiohaemum charity endowment. Nadri still plans to mediate lucrative contracts for Czech companies.
“Opportunities lie in the construction of roads and railways. Opportunities worth billions of crowns,” MfD quotes Nadri as saying.
