Court gives the whole of Lucerna Palace to Havel’s sister-in-law

After years of appeals, Dagmar Havlová, the sister-in-law of the late former Czech president Václav Havel, received a court ruling on Wednesday that confirmed her ownership rights to the whole of the Lucerna Palace, located on Prague’s central Vodičková street. The wife of Václav Havel’s brother Ivan received ownership rights to one half of the building as a gift from her husband in the early 1990’s and was looking to buy the other half ever since. The former president, though, sold his half of the building to a company Chemapol Realty in 1997. The company sold it two years later to Ms Havlová before it filed for bankruptcy, for a sum that was 55 thousand crowns lower than what it had paid for the palace to Mr Havel. The bankruptcy administrator filed a complaint against the sale claiming that the reduction in price was unsubstantiated and that the company sold the real estate during bankruptcy proceedings when it could make these kinds of decisions independently. The Wednesday decision of the Prague High Appeals Court upheld the April verdict of the City Court that determined that Chemapol Reality sold its half of the Lucerna Palace for the market price and that the sale was not part of the bankruptcy proceedings.