News

Billionaire businessman and high-profile lobbyist Roman Janoušek must return to prison to finish out his sentence for a hit-and-run incident while drunk driving, the Regional Court in Brno has ordered.

Janoušek was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison but was released after one year, following brain surgery and on the grounds that he was suffering from an incurable disease.

In February, photographs emerged of him skiing at a resort in the Austrian Alps, and authorities have concluded that since having surgery he has shown no signs of serious health problems.

Eyewitnesses to the 2012 hit-and-run incident testified that Janoušek deliberately ran over a woman with his luxury Porsche Cayenne after damaging her car in a minor collision. He also been accused of allegedly bribing officials, rigging public tenders, and laundering money via a Swiss bank account.

The Prague attorney's office has proposed reopening trial of former Czechoslovak Army general Jan Syrový, who served as prime minister during the Munich Crisis and was convicted in 1947 of collaborating with the Nazi occupiers.

A lawyer working on behalf of a descendant of Syrový had lobbied for a retrial. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Syrový was arrested and charged with collaboration. He was convicted in a 1947 show trial and sentenced him to 20 years of imprisonment in severe conditions. He was released in 1960 by Antonín Novotný’s amnesty but left with no pension and barred by the communist regime from employment.

The online service Forgotten Billions (Zapomenuté miliardy) has helped some 17,000 people collect a total of 320 million crowns in ‘coupon privatization’-era funds so far, the Brno start-up Stock Convertor says.

The service helps people find out if they still own shares or dividends in former Czechoslovak-state owned assets privatised in the 1990s. On average, most people’s ‘forgotten money’ amounted to 20,000 crowns. Some have recovered hundreds of thousands of crowns.

Under the so-called ‘coupon privatisation’ that started on 1 October 1991, every adult citizen of Czechoslovakia could buy a coupon book worth 1,000 crowns and use them to buy corporate shares. Nearly 6 million people did so.

Countess Mathilda Nostitz, heiress of the Czech noble Nostic family, has died at the age of 85, the Mathilda Endowment Fund, which she founded, announced on Wednesday.

Mathilda Nostitz was born at the chateau in Planá near Mariánské Lázně. Although her ancestors declared their Czech nationality, after the Communists came to power, the family left Czechoslovakia in June 1948, when she was 12.

After returning to her homeland in 1990, she devoted herself to helping the visually impaired, in part through training guide dogs and supporting young blind musicians.