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42 I Central Europe bne April 2021
Kellner, 56, was the richest man in Central Europe, with a personal fortune estimated at $17.5bn.
OBITUARY:
Petr Kellner, Central Europe's great dealmaker
of Home Credit, as well as Home Credit shareholder Jiri Smejc, together with Kellner’s wife Renata, are all likely to have a say in the group's strategy going forward.
Killer whale
Like several of the super-rich in the former Czechoslovakia, Kellner made his fortune by setting up an investment fund during Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus’ botched coupon privatisation programme in the early 1990s. Kellner was one of the “pikes” whom Klaus helped introduce to the country’s fishpond to stir the country’s sluggish state-owned “carp” into movement.
But unlike many of his fellow asset strippers and corporate raiders, PPF
not only delivered a decent return for
its coupon investors, but also had the stamina to become a long-term player on the Czech financial scene.
Becoming more of a killer whale in the country’s small pool, Kellner seized control of monopoly insurer Ceska Pojistovna in 1996 after buying a 20% stake. This enabled PPF, together with allies, to outvote the state. Afterwards, Klaus’ finance minister, Ivan Kocarnik, who appeared to turn a blind eye to
the state’s loss of control, immediately glided through the revolving door to become the insurer’s chairman. Much later, Kellner became the main funder of Klaus’ personal foundation.
Kellner overhauled the dinosaur insurer, bought out the state in 2001, and used its financial muscle to expand into other businesses and make opportunistic ventures. In 2007 he agreed to fold Ceska Pojistovna into a joint venture with Generali, which he exited in 2012 for €2.5bn.
This sale enabled Kellner to supercharge the expansion of Home Credit, a consumer lender he had launched in 1997. After experimenting with the format in Central Europe, he expanded east to Russia in 2002, and then from 2007 into China.
However, in recent years Home Credit has often struggled with rising loan
Robert Anderson in Prague
Petr Kellner, who was killed on March 27 in a helicopter crash while on a snowboarding holiday in Alaska, was by far the most famous and successful Czech businessman
of his generation, and his death will leave a huge hole in the country’s business scene.
Kellner, 56, was the richest man in Central Europe, with a personal fortune estimated at $17.5bn by Forbes. He made his fortune in the ‘Wild East’ of the Czech transformation from communism in the early 1990s but unlike many of the country’s other new tycoons, he quickly outgrew the country to become a major regional player in consumer finance, telecoms and media. He rapidly expanded his Home Credit consumer finance group into the Russian and Chinese markets, making it the world’s largest non-banking consumer lender.
A natural predator, he always remained a big player in Czech dealmaking across a range of sectors through his PPF Group, which has €44bn in assets, and was also influential behind the scenes in politics, a position enhanced by his
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acquisition of the main commercial TV station TV Nova last year.
His tragic death will change the balance of power among the country’s ‘oligarchs’, among whom he was the unchallenged king, and could have an impact even on the country’s orientation towards China.
His death has immediately raised questions about the future succession, direction or even the potential break-up of PPF, the financial group in which he had a 99% stake. It also raises questions about its unit Home Credit, which is currently undergoing a strategic rethink after rising loan losses in Russia and China. It will also create uncertainty over two big ongoing deals in the
Czech market: the listing of PPF’s telecom infrastructure arm Cetin, and the proposed merger between its start- up digital bank Air Bank and Moneta Money Bank.
PPF shareholder and telecom and media manager Ladislav Bartonicek, who has been with PPF since the beginning, was quickly named interim manager on March 29. Jean-Pascal Duvieusart, head