Final Word from Tuesday, November 11, 2014
The 25th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution is reason to celebrate, and it's also reason to look back critically at what transpired in the early days of the transformation. Václav Klaus is once again everywhere, but's he's not very happy that the criticism is outweighing the praise. On Hyde Park on Fri., he objected to the ubiquitous picture of him with Viktor Kožený at a tennis match and said that they weren't sitting together and that he only ever spoke to Kožený once. He also referred to the commingling of the managers' and customers' money under the infamous law on investment companies and funds as one of the dozens of details of the transformation. Maybe it could have been done better, he said, but he doesn't think it was anything of significance that influenced the transformation. Klaus is right about one thing. It's unfair for the picture of Kožený to bandied about so much. Given the continuing impact of the law on investment companies and funds on Czech business and politics, it should instead be a picture of Klaus with Petr Kellner of PPF. [Czech Republic commingle Harvard Capital]
Glossary of difficult words
ubiquitous - present, appearing or found everywhere;
to commingle - to mix or blend; in securities, it is the mixing of customer-owned securities with brokerage-owned securities;
to bandy something about/around - to spread, mention or repeat.