UP&DOWN

UP&DOWN
Written by: Monika Mudranincová

PEOPLE UP

Photo: Jan Vágner		Jiří Komorous The chief of the National Drug Headquarters led his team in the recent arrest of drug mafia bosses, whose business extended from Prague throughout Europe. The squad confiscated a record amount of drugs – a quarter ton of heroin and 19 kg of cocaine.
Photo: archiv		Jonathan Hallett The partner and executive director of real estate agency Cushman & Wakefield Healey & Baker accepted the first place CiJ Award 2003 for best real estate agency in the Czech Republic. The readers of Construction Journal chose the winner.
Photo: Petr Poliak		Karla Stephens The general director of Oskar has reason to smile. In a 2003 evaluation of services, price, customer relations, and technologies, 38% of Mobility and MobilMania magazines’ 16,000 readers chose Oskar. Eurotel was second and T-Mobile third.

PEOPLE DOWN

Photo: Vojtěch Vlk		Peter Kovarčík The Hockey Union filed bankruptcy proceedings against marketing partner Teleaxis and its owner for debts worth CZK 18 million. The Union also terminated the contract of the national team’s marketing partner, and commercial rights to the world championship.
Photo: Jan Šilpoch		Michael Kocáb The bankruptcy administrator of the Trend fund, Vítězslav Hálek, filed criminal complaints on seven people, including Kocáb and his former business partner Martin Kratochvíl. Hálek suspects that the seven stole CZK 318.4 million and caused damage to Trend of almost half a billion crowns.
Photo: ČTK		Viktor Koláček The co-owner of the OKD North-Moravian mines and his business partners are charged with having tunnelled CZK 1.5 billion from OKD into Koláček’s company Karbon Invest. Police say he damaged the interests of other OKD shareholders, especially the state.

Photo: Tomáš Kubeš

David Řezníček: Not sitting down on the job
IN JANUARY 2004, David Řezníček (38), a graduate of the School of Economics, where he studied foreign trade, will quit his job as director of Vitra Czech Republic. He decided to devote himself fully to the activities of his own firm, Konsepti, which imports furniture. His firm’s portfolio of customers is similar to that of Vitra, which is one of the reasons he decided to leave his “dream position” – balancing on the edge of conflict of interest was exhausting. Since the beginning of the ’90s this enthusiastic lover of architecture and design has been able to accomplish a great deal – he was the general director of the Dutch firm Ahrend, a partner of the company Tunnel, a founder of Designblok, and the publisher of BLOK, a magazine dealing with fashion, design, and style. He successfully managed Vitra for four years, and under his leadership the company became one of the three largest importers of furniture in the country, selling about 6,000 chairs a year. In 1996 Řezníček and his partner, founded Konsepti, for which he purchased an old 1,300 m2 factory in Holešovice that was built in 1909. The building currently serves as the headquarters of Konsepti and Vitra, and also houses a café, a showroom, and a shop. In the near future Řezníček intends to double the usable space, to accomodate new shops and spaces for young artists at the beginning of their careers. He will be helped with this by his wife Lucie, a former school-mate who, besides raising two sons, ran Konsepti when Řezníček worked for Vitra. Now he’ll have more time for his family, sports, and music, and hopes that he’ll one day build a loft apartment in his beloved Holešovice.

	Photo: Tomáš Kubeš

Miro Smolák: Taking artistic savoir-faire into space
THIS YEAR Miro Smolák (52), a Slovak residing in Prague, will celebrate the tenth anniversary of his founding of the Galerie MIRO, which he manages in St. Rochus Church. MIRO is seen by locals as a place where works by such world-renowned artists as Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Georges Braque can be seen, as well as paintings by the likes of Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones. Smolák has done well over the past decade – last year his turnover was CZK 20 million, and over the last five years his gallery has been running in the black, drawing great interest from visitors. According to research by Gallup, Galerie MIRO is the most popular commercial gallery in Prague (MF Dnes, 27 June 2001).
Smolák has an inborn knack for doing business in art; he understands it, and he can sense what will be profitable. As far back as childhood, he even sold paintings by his brother Andrej. After graduating from the School of Philosophy and the Film Academy of the Performing Arts, he became an art dealer through Artcentrum in Bohemia and Slovart in Slovakia. Thirteen years ago, he returned to Czechoslovakia from Germany, where he had lived for twenty-five years. Karel Gott loaned him the first million (without interest) to get his business going in Prague. The debt was repaid within two years.
” I started from scratch, I even sold the tickets myself,” Smolák recalls, adding that he attributes his success to firmly-held beliefs. He currently has seven employees, and is planning on building a Salvador Dalí Museum in Prague sometime in the future. He’s also looking forward to his sixtieth birthday, which he intends to spend in orbit as a space tourist. He’s already preparing for it intensively – he’s learned to swim and has lost eighteen kilos by exercising. “I want to see the Earth from the distance of space and experience the bliss,” the art dealer says dreamily.