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According to information from the recently published report on the half-year results of the PPF group, Šmejc concluded the agreement through his company MEF Holdings. “Under this agreement, the group has exchanged all the risks and rewards associated with its 12.34 percent stake in Yettel Bank for a cash amount in the lower millions of euros,” the PPF group said in a statement on the transaction with MEF Holdings. It was therefore a transaction in the order of tens of millions of crowns. “Mr. Šmejc is not a shareholder of the bank. This is a derivative with a purely financial settlement,” Šmejc’s spokesman Pavel Zuna adds to the transaction.
Already in February, Šmejc acquired similar rights to a 2.7 percent stake in Yettel Bank. In total, it thus holds the equivalent of an ownership stake of roughly 15 percent in the Serbian banking house.
Šmejc thus continues to work in a financial institution that falls under the PPF. In the past, he was even a shareholder of Home Credit and Air Bank. But last April, the PPF group bought an 8.88 percent stake in the Home Credit group, which provides consumer loans, from Šmejc’s Emma Capital group. It thus completely controlled the Home Credit group.
This year, however, Šmejc returned at least to the Serbian bank, gradually increasing his participation. “I assume that this form of engagement of Mr. Šmejc was a reflection of his trust in Yettel Bank,” Zuna comments on the transaction.
After all, Šmejc’s Emma Capital group has long-term faith in the Balkan countries. “It’s not a dogma, but regionally we really usually move from Prague to the south and east. It’s because we see the potential in some of these countries that was in the Czech Republic ten or fifteen years ago,” commented Emma Capital’s investment director Pavel Horák on the strategy in the annual report of the largest Central European fund J&T Arch. “We are betting that Western investors look down on these countries,” he said. Last year, the J&T Arch fund became a minority shareholder of Emma Alpha Holding, the main investment platform of the Emma Capital group, for 2.5 billion crowns.
Šmejc also concluded an agreement with PPF, within the framework of which he acquired the equivalent of ownership shares in Yettel Bank and the telecommunications e& PPF Telecom Group. For fifty million euros, Šmejc acquired the rights to the aforementioned 2.7 percent stake in the Serbian bank, as well as the rights to a roughly 1.33 percent stake in e& PPF Telecom Group, where the PPF Group has a stake of 50 percent without one share, according to the half-yearly report of the PPF Group. The rest of the telecommunications group is owned by Emirates Telecommunication Group Company (e&) of the United Arab Emirates. It bought the stake from the PPF group at the end of last year.
The agreement on rights to shares in both companies will expire in 2030, according to information in the half-yearly report of the PPF group, unless certain conditions are met earlier. Šmejc himself described the transaction as an “interesting investment opportunity”.
Jiří Šmejc, even after his departure from the head of the PPF, remains in its bodies. He became a member of the PPF supervisory board.
