A helicopter crash ferrying skiers to a remote ridge near Alaska’s Knik Glacier last month ended the life of the Czech Republic’s richest man, Petr Kellner. It also set in motion the biggest wealth transfer of the post-Soviet Union bloc.
At stake is a fortune valued at $15.7 billion by the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the leadership of PPF Group NV, a conglomerate with 44 billion euros ($52 billion) of assets as of June, of which he controlled 99%.
While the 56-year-old entrepreneur’s widow and four children stand to inherit his wealth, succession arrangements are unclear. On the business side, minority shareholder Ladislav Bartonicek will manage the firm’s operations as his family didn’t play an important role in PPF’s day-to-day operations.
“As organized as Petr Kellner had to be, I’m sure he took care of everything to make the process as simple as possible,” said Petr Kincl, an associate partner at PWC Legal, which represents local and international clients. “Usually, the whole transfer takes a few months, and I don’t see why this would take more than a year.”
While Kellner was instrumental in negotiating some of PPF’s past deals, the group will be able to carry on without its founder, according to Jean-Pascal Duvieusart, a minority shareholder and chief executive officer of PPF’s financial arm, Home Credit Group BV. Analysts at Ceska Sporitelna AS and J&T Banka AS have said they expect no immediate impact.
Critical Time
“Petr had put in place a governance relying on a large team of very senior professionals and a structure where a lot of the responsibility is within individual companies,” Duvieusart said.
Kellner was among five people killed in the March 27 crash of the Airbus AS350 B3 chopper that went down about 50 miles northeast of Anchorage. The copter slid 800 to 900 feet (244 to 274 meters) down the snow-covered mountain before coming to rest, investigators said. An avid snowboarder and kite surfer, Kellner had been on vacation at a remote luxury lodge.
His death comes at a critical time as PPF is trying to take over Prague-traded Moneta Money Bank AS and weighing a potential sale of a minority stake in its Cetin Group BV telecommunication-infrastructure unit.
PPF Chief Financial Officer Katerina Jiraskova said she expects the Moneta merger to move forward and that the group is sorting out ownership technicalities, according to Czech daily Hospodarske Noviny. She doesn’t see family members joining PPF immediately, though they are entitled to it if they wish.
The group is recovering from coronavirus-related losses suffered by its Home Credit unit. Its consumer lender in Asia and eastern Europe returned to moderate profits in the second half of 2020 after booking record loan impairments in the first six months of the year. The other main leg of Kellner’s sprawling business empire, telecoms in central and eastern Europe, has been relatively unaffected by the pandemic.