Viktor Kožený
Czech-born fugitive financier (born 1963) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Viktor Kožený (born 28 June 1963 in Prague, Czechoslovakia) is a fugitive financier.
This article needs to be updated. (November 2014) |
According to Bloomberg News, he graduated from Harvard in 1989 with a bachelor's degree in economics.[1] However, he cannot be located in the Harvard Alumni directory as of 2015. Viktor Kožený is an Irish citizen imprisoned in the Bahamas in 2005[2] but released in 2007. He currently lives in a gated community in the Bahamas.[3] Efforts to bring him to justice stem from both the Czech Republic and the USA. An international warrant has been issued for Kožený, who in the early 1990s ran one of the great scams of the post-Communist era.[2] By the media he is often called "the pirate of Prague".[2]
He was imprisoned after a US extradition request, but that was refused by Bahaman authorities in October 2007.
In February 2008 a court case against him and his partner Boris Vostrý started at Prague Municipal Court. Kožený has remained in the Bahamas and has not been attending the trial. He asked the prosecution to publish the charges on the Internet, which the state prosecutor has refused to do.[4] His defense counsel later published the indictment upon order from Kožený.
In 2010, Kožený was convicted of fraud by a Czech court and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and ordered to pay damages equal to hundreds of millions in USD. In 2012, the judgment was reaffirmed by the High Court in Prague with minor changes. An enforcement action based on this judgement has been lodged by the fraud victim in New York, targeting assets frozen by US authorities.[5] The defendant in the case is a company owned beneficially by Kožený's mother, Jitka Chvatik. Assets of the company have been refrozen by the court after the company lost an appeal in 2014.[6] The case is still pending.
As of January 2019, Kožený is still internationally wanted by the Czech and US criminal justice. He is effectively confined to The Bahamas, holding his Irish passport.