The 1990s also saw the final absorption of Petrimex by its original subsidiary Agrofert. According to a BIS report that monitored the process, a plan was hatched to take over the entire fertiliser business in all the territories where Petrimex had previously operated. This was to result in a 30 to 40 per cent drop in Petrimex’s sales.
The gradual takeover of the Petrimex business is demonstrable. Agrofert started a war with its parent company on the personnel, business and legal level. Thus, the dismantling of Petrimex took several months to years.
On 29 April 1995, the Minister of Economy of the Slovak Republic, Ján Ducký, from the HZDS movement of Slovak Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar, replaced the management of the state-owned Petrimex. Andrej Babiš together with Anton Rakický quit the key positions at that time.
Shortly thereafter, on 2 May 1995, the Regional Commercial Court in Prague registered an increase in the share capital of Agrofert from one million crowns to four million crowns. This registration put Petrimex in the position of a minority shareholder of Agrofert. After the controversial general meeting, where it is still suspected that the signatures of some of the voters were forged, the state-owned company retained a quarter of Agrofert’s shares.
The majority was controlled by a mysterious and unannounced investor – a Swiss company called O.F.I. (Ost Finanz und Investment AG). According to Babiš, the company was backed by his former classmates from the lyceum he attended in Geneva in his youth. However, the company was represented by Libor Široký, a former member of the SNB counterintelligence agency, and few details about it have ever been made public. There are doubts as to whether the general meeting in which Petrimex was put on the back burner actually took place.
According to Babiš himself and what can be confirmed, another important source of money for Agrofert was loans from the US Citibank. At this point, it is interesting to note that the loans to Agrofert were allocated by the bank’s regional manager Libor Němeček. He later became a member of Agrofert’s board of directors and is in charge of mergers, acquisitions and corporate financing. In addition, he is one of the key people in the investment firm Hartenberg.
The foreign company Fertagra also played an important role in the creation of Agrofert. It entered the companies later controlled by Agrofert as a silent partner. Babiš does not mention it in the biographies and descriptions of the creation of Agrofert. It is likely that it participated in the development mainly as a source of capital. Moreover, in the 1990s, the foreign investor was credible and its investment plan almost certainly enjoyed a positive attitude from the state authorities.
Fertagra was founded in 1995 in Switzerland. The company’s description of its activities includes trading in agrochemical products. Certainly an interesting and suggestive clue is that the Swiss René Kurth, who was also on the board of O.F.I., sat on the statutory bodies of Fertagra.