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Privatisation
Vaclav Klaus lounged a huge privatisation process about government
property in Czech. With the lead of Klaus and Havel 80% of Czech
economy was privatised before end of 1995. And the privatisation
still continues. Latest large privatisation happened when government
sold 51 % share of Cesky Telecom to Spanish Telefonica and there
are talks about privatisation of Czech Airlines. Privatisation
of course has not been dancing on flowers. Many misuses of governments
property has happened and the former communists made more money
in Velvet Revolution then other criminals did. One American professor
even joked that the best way to do privatisation in Czech would
be to put out all the light in the country for half an hour. Some
seems to think that they are still living in socialistic country,
where everything belongs to government and thus everyone has equal
right to steal it.
And not all got what they wanted as there are still two lawsuits
going on because of privatisation. Families of Schwarzenberg and
princes of Liechtenstein are fighting their rights to own castles
in Sudeten area, which they lost to Nazi German. Communist regime
did not give castles back to owners, as it was nice way to make
private property common one. With out any explanation communist
regime just made law that gave the castles to government. Nowadays
these castles are in bad shape and the rightful owners would have
the money that government lacks to repair them but government
is still holding on old laws. This also reflects relationship
between Czech and German countries. People just don’t seem
to get the real idea of privatisation. During communist time all
used to work for government, so since no one could make profits
there was little sense to innovate or decent service.
Privatisation took its prise as eight banks went down before
1997. Small bank and the Finance Minister were even robbing money
from shareholders. The coupon privatisation didn’t go that
well either, as the leader of it, Mr Lizner, had to go to jail
because he took bribes. This gave the public a very negative image
of the coupon privatisation and privatisation in generally. During
privatisation many ‘robber barons’ made huge fortunes
by using several unorthodox methods. But basically if we look
privatisation more deeply, we can notice that it has something
to do with inward mentality of Czechs. Other Eastern European
countries sold most of the government owned property to foreign
investors but this was not the case in Czech. Property was sold
to Czech citizens, like in coupon privatisation. It’s still
big issue that Germans got their national pride Skoda. This reflects
the weird relation Czechs have against foreigners. After been
multinational country for many centuries it’s only now that
Czechs have their own country with homogenous culture and they
want to keep it that way.
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