Economist Ján Ducký made a name for himself during the former regime. Before the fall of socialist Czechoslovakia, he worked his way up to management positions in the state-owned company Merina, and then to the position of sales director of the Trenčín-based clothing company Slovakotex.
He always knew in which circles to move, and that is why he was on the right side already in the period when the republic was being divided. He was already a prominent figure in politics between 1989 and 1990, when he sat in the chair of the temporary Minister of Industry in the Slovak Government of National Understanding. He returned to office as Minister of Economy of the Slovak Republic in the second and third governments of Vladimir Mečiar.
The public knows Ján Ducký mainly as a fierce fighter for the interests of the HZDS movement’s sponsors. It was he who was supposed to be one of those who resisted the idea of handing over the Slovak chemical industry to Andrej Babiš and sought ways to get entrepreneurs from the Mečiar family into key companies.
Although as a loyal associate of Mečiar he decided on the privatisation of key companies in the chemical and energy sectors, he became famous mainly as the head of the Slovak Gas Industry (SPP).
His name will forever be linked to the so-called Duckie promissory note case, which apparently cost him his life in the end. As director of SPP, he signed an unknown number of promissory notes of the company with an unknown number of counterparties. The documents were to be in return for “services of a commercial and financial nature”.
However, these were only fictitious services, which were a pretext for the payment of unknown sums of money, estimated at the time to be worth billions of Slovak crowns.
At that time, the Slovak gas industry still used taxpayers’ money to pay, for example, the costs of a lost promissory note dispute with the Czech Union Bank, which demanded repayment of promissory notes worth CZK 350 million. Interest was added, bringing the promissory note debt, together with court fees, to approximately CZK 400 million. The promissory notes owned by Union Banka were allegedly used to pay for the delivery of technology to Sezooz Group, a company in Vsetín. Its director Roman Zubík admitted in one of his statements that the transactions with promissory notes were really fictitious, managed by Ducký, which Union Banka knew about.
There’s a lot of evidence that the promissory notes were behind the order to kill Duckie. Apparently as a safeguard against his eventual denunciation, four shots were fired in January 1999, ending the life of the corrupt politician and manager right at the gate of his home.
Even after more than 15 years, the murder has not been solved. Slovak investigators have accused a Czech and Slovak mafia hitman, Ukrainian Oleg T.
