Lawyer Vladimír Bartoš and his client, convicted gunman Dušan Pintye, are demanding that state fuel distributor Čepro repay a Kč 254 million claim. Bartoš, who in August 2009 acquired Kč 127 million of Pintye’s claim, launched insolvency proceedings and presented a bankruptcy petition against the company. According to Čepro general director Jiří Borovec, the claim is based on false assertions. As expected, the court on Wednesday rejected the Kč 127 million claim.
Bartoš said the claim arose in 2001 when Čepro purportedly also owed a debt to Slovak refinery Slovnaft. Pintye alleges that at the time he delivered nearly 1 million Iraqi dinars to the state-owned firm’s headquarters. The money was meant to be repaid gradually, but this did not happen. Čepro states that Pintye never gave any Iraqi dinars to the company.
Pintye is now serving a 14-year jail sentence in a prison in Valdice, Hradec Králové region, for shooting Imrich Gorol and injuring two of the man’s relatives. According to the eight-year-old conviction in Ústí nad Labem District Court, Pintye got in a fight with Gorol on the town square of Jiříkov, Ústí nad Labem region, over a deal involving rum; he shot Gorol with an unregistered firearm.
Untrustworthy persons?
“That insolvency statement not only constitutes bullying, it also comes from highly untrustworthy individuals. While one of the supposed creditors is serving a prison term for serious violent crimes, the other supposed creditor by all accounts has difficulty practicing his legal profession in an ethical manner. This duo is currently trying to con the state out of hundreds of millions of crowns,” Čepro’s Borovec said.
‘That insolvency statement not only constitutes bullying, it also comes from highly untrustworthy individuals.’
Borovec says he is convinced the case is part of a broader conspiracy where a group of persons during the past years attempted to strip Čepro of several billion crowns. The cases originated from deals between the companies Bena and Tukový průmysl and the use of these two companies’ services in connection with Čepro’s storage facilities. The aim was tax fraud.
This resulted in several lawsuits in which Tukový průmysl, Ventura and M Port demanded payments from Čepro amounting to several billion crowns. But because one of their staff members in the mailroom was bribed, Čepro nearly ended up losing these legal disputes. The mail room employee withheld and destroyed summonses, leading Čepro to lose case after case, unaware that it was accused of anything. In a default judgment, Prague Municipal Court Judge David Hovorka ruled that the state enterprise should pay Kč 2.6 billion on the basis of a fictitious claim.
In the end, this fraud — which according to unconfirmed reports was contrived by fugitive businessman Radovan Krejčíř — was only stopped by the Constitutional Court. It overturned all previous rulings and referred the cases back to the beginning. From that point on, Čepro has been winning at the courts.
Last week, Čepro succeeded in the High Court, which upheld the previous ruling of the Prague Municipal Court stating that Čepro does not owe M Port anything. M Port’s appeal was rejected in its entirety; the High Court ruling is final. In its official press release, Čepro stated its conviction that Bartoš’s and Pintye’s filing a insolvency statement was “a last ditch desperate reaction to the closing of the M Port case.”
Čepro controls the Czech state’s fuel and oil products reserves. It has a wholesale fuel business and operates a network of 192 filling stations under the EuroOil brand. Čepro owns more than 1,100 km of product pipelines, as well as storage tanks with a 1.76 million cubic meter capacity. Čepro’s 2010 earnings amounted to Kč 44 billion and it had a record profit of Kč 960 million.
