Page 35 - bne_Magazine_May_2017_print

bne May 2017 Cover story I 35
POLAND
Lorincz Meszaros Hungary (4)
Lorincz Meszaros puts his success down to three things: “God, good luck and the person of Viktor Orban.” Something has certainly helped him: this decade the pipe-fitter has had a meteoric rise into a business magnate, helped by some €1bn in
EU contracts in the last five years.
Born in Karcag, on the Hungarian Great Plain (Alfold), in 1966, Meszaros rose from humble origins to set up a pipe-fitting business during the more relaxed Communist era in the 1980s.
His fortunes were transformed when Meszaros met Orban at Felcsut FC, the tiny semi-professional village club that Orban played for during his first tenure as prime minister from 1998- 2002 and where he keeps a home.
Meszaros rose to become Felcsút village mayor in 2011 and then began a amazing business career.
Pre-2011, Mészáros’s annual income averaged around HUF19mn (€60,000). Since then Meszaros has become a major beneficiary of public tenders and a large-scale investor in road construction, real estate development, tourism and hotels. He has also bought the Croatian football club NG Osijek, and owns a luxurious €2.2mn villa on the island of Vir, together with a yacht.
He is also now a major media
owner through his interests in Konzum, Opimus, Opimus Press and Mediaworks, the owner of national cable news channel Echo TV, the national sports daily Nemzeti Sport, economic daily Vilaggazdasag,
and eight local newspapers.
Last October, Hungary’s newspaper of record Nepszabadsag shut down unexpectedly. It was later sold to Opimus Press, a subsidiary of Opimus Holding. In March Meszaros was revealed as the real – or at least apparent – owner of Opimus Press.
1
Zygmunt Solorz-Zak $2.6bn
Communications, media, energy
Solorz-Zak (61) – who worked for the communist secret police in the 1980s - might have more influence on the Poles than anyone else. He founded Poland’s first private commercial televi- sion Polsat in 1992, and in 2011, he splashed
out PLN18bn to buy mobile operator Polkomtel, which pioneered the use of LTE in Poland.
2
Tomasz Biernacki $240mn
Retail
Biernacki (44) launched the supermarket chain Dino in 1999, which soon grew to compete suc- cessfully with established chains such as Jeronimo Martins. Dino’s PLN1.65bn (€390mn) IPO on the Warsaw Stock Exchange took place in late April.
3
Solange and Krzysztof Olszewskis
$210mn Manufacturing
The Olszewskis (both 66) have made Solaris the symbol of the rebirth of manufacturing in Po- land, having earned an international reputation by making buses and trams that are ubiquitous in Polish cities and also exported to 26 countries.
4
Maciej Formanowicz $170mn
Furniture
Formanowicz, 67, CEO of furniture maker Forte, began working in furniture companies under communism, and then bought a factory in Ostrow Mazowiecka in privatisation. Germany is an impor- tant market for Forte, but the company is also sell- ing further west, to the Netherlands and the UK.
SLOVAKIA
1
Patrik Tkac
$415mn
Finance and real estate
Tkac (43) leveraged his father Jozef’s communist banking links to set up J&T Finance Group with his friend Ivan Jakabovic, expanding later into banking, energy, engineering and the media. Last year Tkac sold a 10% stake in J&T to the murky CEFC China, in a deal that valued his company at €1.6bn; CEFC wants to raise its stake to 50%.
2
Jaroslav Hascak $600mn
Finance, healthcare, real estate, betting
Hascak (47) is managing partner of Penta Group, a onetime corporate raider now holding €8.5bn in assets, focused on long-term investments in Central European financial services, healthcare and real estate. However, in Slovakia it is notorious for the Gorilla corruption scandal that finished off former premier Mikulas Dzurinda’s SDKU party.
3
Ivan Chrenko $1.1bn
Real estate
Famously media shy, Chrenko found himself in the headlines in April by becoming the first Slo- vak to appear in Forbes magazine’s billionaires list through his HB Reavis real estate developer. Chrenko stepped back from day-to-day man- agement in 2013, by which time HB Reavis had grown to become one of Europe’s top developers.
www.bne.eu