Invisible billionaire Patrik Tkáč and his world on the line Bratislava-Prague-Bordeaux
Patrik Tkáč was hit by a car while riding his bicycle. Of the sentences you want to read the least while moderating the Better Czechia conference, this one is very high. Below our feet we looked at each other and in a few seconds we exchanged all our concerns.
The main one was obvious – did a tragic coincidence cost the life of a leading capitalist again? The second one was, quite frankly, purely cynical, but quite logical given our profession – are we really going to shove the rare interview with the head of J&T in a drawer?
Fortunately, neither of them came true. “While riding my bike, I was hit by a car from a side road and the driver fled the scene. I’m beat up, but I’ve been really, really lucky not to have any serious injuries. I’m happy to be alive,” he wrote to us in response to the accident.
A rather strong symbolism can be found in the whole incident. The tragic death of Petr Kellner, whose passion for heliskiing in Alaska became fatal, was for Czech-Slovak businessmen what is called a wake-up call in Anglophone countries.
It was a bitter realization that no one knew the day or the hour and that not being prepared for what would happen to one’s accession and inheritance in the event of an unfortunate event was irresponsible to say the least. “Unfortunately, even the memento of Peter’s death brought dramatic speed to these conversations. Everyone realized that we are the youngest and that we are mortal,” admits Patrik Tkáč.
As much as the forty-nine-year-old businessman and investor takes stock and evaluates the past, he still has his eyes fixed on the future. He is even now experiencing a return to an active role – he personally initiated the creation and wrote the strategy of a new fund with the characteristic name Arch.
The main figures – or families – of the J&T world put most of their assets into it, i.e. billions of euros, so that they are literally on the same page as the clients whose money they are taking care of, and at the same time enter into other investments with them.
The capital power house of two letters – based on the surnames of the co-founders Jakabovič and Tkáč – has fundamentally offered the entire Czech-Slovak business for almost three decades of existence, financing and building it. When something big needs to be financed, J&T is called.
His traces can be found in PPF of the Kellner family, KKCG of Karel Komárek, CPIPG of Radovan Vítek and a number of other enterprises, while almost every wealthy person with an address in the Czech Republic or Slovakia has money in J&T bank.
However, one particular name stands out above all the others that the world of J&T brought together or created – Daniel Křetínský. One of the richest Czechs and the mastermind of the EPH group started at J&T as an analyst, to whom Patrik Tkáč gradually gave more and more trust.
“Martin Fedor once tutored Dan on the Kabelovna project and came to me saying that there was no need to play teacher and student. That this guy is ready and that we can immediately give him another project,” Patrik Tkáč recalls Křetínský’s beginnings twenty years ago. Their partnership eventually became the most profitable ever in J&T’s history.
Only a share in EPH today for Tkáč and spol. represents a value exceeding, according to our calculations, at least 1.5 billion euros and EPH is the energy backbone of both countries and one of the largest energy groups in Europe with a turnover of over eighteen billion euros, power plants and energy companies in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Great Britain , France and Switzerland, backbone gas pipelines and gas reservoirs and twenty-four thousand employees.
Joint investment forays into public markets, especially in the West, are then undertaken by the tandem through the entity Vesa Equity Investment, where – to put it simply – Daniel Křetínský devises investment opportunities and Patrik Tkáč provides capital.
Together, they invested in this way, for example, in the American Foot Locker, where they made hundreds of millions of crowns in the last month alone, in the British Royal Mail or the Sainsbury’s chain.
Through Czech Media Invest, Patrik Tkáč also has stakes in media from the Czech Blesk to the French Le Monde. Tkáč and his group also have a significant footprint in the Tatras and Krkonoše Mountains, developing ski resorts there for several years and investing hundreds of millions and billions of crowns.
However, it is not just billion-dollar investments that make Patrik Tkáč alive. In Děvín, Slovakia, which he considers his home, he literally tinkers with a grocery store, where he plays with many robotic technologies. At the same time, thanks to his wife Iveta, he invests in a dance school in Bratislava. The Capitol itself is then represented by wine.
Patrik Tkáč, casually dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt, with a graying lush beard, talks about his business and life in an extremely colorful and colorful way. He is open, funny, sometimes he seems to take stock and thinks long and hard about the answers.
This unique interview took place at the headquarters of the winery belonging to J&T, in Saint Emilion, France, among the vineyards. You can get everything in it – wine, money, electricity, politics, football and commitment to your father or your own country.
Do you still define J&T a lot and J&T a lot define you?
I have such a comeback now. Building the Arch makes sense to me. Most importantly, we want to focus mainly on equity money management. We could, for example, sell a few percent of EPH to Dan, pay off the clients and put our feet on the table. But luckily we don’t want to go in that direction.
On the contrary, we are entering into new agreements with our managers, forming the management of the bank in order to move towards managing the equity part. And I probably had a period when I was more or less in a controlling role. But now I personally wrote the Arch strategy, I personally put my influence into building it.
The company is not dependent on me, it is a functioning institution and I am proud of that. But I’ve come back now to personally help with this transformation, to make the company more transparent and for clients to know where their money is. No fog, now we clearly say, this is our money, we combine it with the money of our clients, and this fact alone can multiply our possibilities even more.
What is J&T today?
Defining J&T has always been difficult. The core has always been the bank and financial institution. But there is such a widely used abbreviation that anything we touch is J&T. We have always said that J&T is an association of people who do business together – Jakabovič, Korbačka, Fedor, Martinec and so on.
But as the regulation changed, the company changed and the market position changed, so did the structure. This distinguishes us from companies that simply define their name, from which everything is immediately clear. Historically, this was not the case with us.
However, we are all getting older and trying to make the business sustainable, with which comes the institutionalization and standardization of procedures. So today everything that is J&T can be covered under two entities – one is J&T Finance Group which covers all banking activities.
The second is J&T Private Equity, where all the money that we as a family have managed to earn over 28 years in business that is not directly related to banking is pooled.
What do you think J&T is worth today?
A long time ago, we established a thing that we are proud of. It’s called the Bible and it’s a managerial view of our world where we try to have some conservative estimate of our own above the level of all audits. We say there that we manage eleven billion euros of ourselves and our clients. Of this, clients account for roughly 4.5 billion.
What exactly are those other businesses besides banking?
What we are trying to show today is the Arch fund. The biggest asset that J&T has is the trust of its clients. For clients to come and create how we invest money, the Arch fund, in which we expect our families to invest the vast majority of their funds. When you buy investments for a hundred million and give most of them to clients, it’s so weird.
We feel that we can keep up with them capital-wise, and at the same time, we feel like it’s a great show of confidence to let clients into the same investments where our families are. Steps to fill the Arch fund are currently only conditional on legislation. This is not easy, every transaction today must be approved by the appropriate authorities.
It’s not like we take everything and put it in Arch. Today, the fund has one billion euros in it, but the equity that we manage in total today is roughly eleven billion. From this we have to subtract approximately two billion from the banking part, which will always act independently.
Today, the potential of client and our money that can go into the Arch fund is up to nine billion euros, of which half is the client’s money and half is our money.
So you put everything there, including the share in EPH?
Yes. Of course, it has its drawbacks, which need to be solved and explained along the way, but yes, that is our ambition. Part of our share is already there. We will try to continue to keep up with clients so that it is fifty-fifty and we do not feel that we are falling behind.
It should be remembered that, in general, I, my father, Jakabović, Korbačka and others have certain shares in the line. We are already at an age where we have started to calculate exactly how much is due to each person. Consider that we are sitting in a winery where J&T Finance Group has an eighty percent stake.
At first, our partner and winemaker Jonathan Maltus was worried that he would only keep twenty percent, but when I explained to him how we have it, he was happy because he is still one of the shareholders. (laughter)
And do you already have this drawn out exactly? Because according to the annual reports, J&T Financial Group (JTFG) is actually 45 percent owned by your father, 45 percent by Ivan Jakabovic and approximately ten percent by Chinese partners…
I have no stake in JTFG, which wouldn’t even make sense because of the million regulations. You spell it right at Forbes when you always refer to us as family. Explaining the relationship between me and my father would be quite difficult, I don’t even know how I would turn out, maybe he won’t give me anything. (laughter)
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