Final Word from Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Hundreds of thousands of people crack open Blesk tabloid or Blesk.cz every day, without knowing who owns the largest Czech daily. Press releases, and even the antitrust office, say that Blesk's top Czech-level owner, Czech Media Invest, is controlled by Patrik Tkáč and Daniel Křetínský, but this is impossible to verify. The owners of Czech Media Invest are officially two offshore companies, Gruenberg Investment B.V. of the Netherlands and Interscope Limited of the U.K. We have stated before that we suspect that one of the real owners is Martin Roman and that Blesk was bought with money sucked out of ČEZ. Why do we mention this again now? Because Křetínský's name appeared in the Panama Papers, and Blesk quoted his spokesman today as saying, "Daniel Křetínský doesn't own any companies other than the ones to which he is listed as a true owner. This means he doesn't use any trusts or nontransparent ownership structures." Taken literally, this is confirmation that he doesn't own Blesk, because its ownership structure is anything but transparent. [Czech Republic Czech News Center Ringier]