As an example of a “clan of the ready”, some entire families can be cited. Not only the example of the Babisis or the Rakicks from the Petrimex story, but also other stories from foreign trade companies, politics or communist security forces point to another phenomenon created by the former regime that survives to this day – family-style clannishness. A kind of caste system of good communists who received benefits and enemies of the state who had no prospect of even a basic career was created.
Today’s middle-aged and aging oligarchs were often the children of their parents in the unpleasant sense of the word. Thanks to their parents’ activities, they were able to study well, travel, make acquaintances, get good jobs and try their first business ventures.
Today, the J&T Group, which is well known in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, is one of the most important European investment groups and its weight exceeds the Central European region. Its origins, however, resemble a mixture of the American dream and the typical vices of the communist elites in the backdrop of the anarchist state system of the early 1990s in Slovakia.
Patrik Tkáč and Ivan Jakabovič are described in the company’s PR as the founders of the financial group. In the media, they repeated stories that the beginning of their business dates back to the time when the two young entrepreneurs started by selling lemonade at the Bratislava airport.
As is often the case with post-communist “selfmade men”, the truth is a bit more prosaic. Everything happened with the help of their parents. The key figure was mainly Tkáč’s father Josef, who was the head of the state-owned Investment and Development Bank. Apart from the information about investment projects, which the young men, first as marketing faces with the attribute of young financial pike, were supplied with by the family, it was also important to have access to capital, which was not available to just anyone at that time. It was already evident here that this was no random action by two young men.
For example, Josef Tkáč acted directly on behalf of Patrik Tkáč and Ivan Jakabovič in the purchase of a stake in the Creditanstalt investment fund from Bank Austria on the basis of a mandate agreement with the Investment Development Bank. It was therefore more a project of Tkáč senior, who financed the purchase with the resources of the state investment bank for which he was to work. The Creditanstalt fund then became the Central European Joint Stock Company. And it is the building block of the later J&T Group.
