Final Word from Thursday, June 1, 2017

There were periods before PPF took over O2 CR when the telecoms operator's email service would go down for days at a time. We wrote about it nine years ago and attributed it to low investment. When O2's roaming services went down this week, the operator blamed the problem on another PPF venture, the Cetin infrastructure company, which in turn said that it could either be a software glitch or a hacking attack. PPF is known far more for its capital-extraction practices than its capital-reinvestment methods, and the roaming problem occurred soon after O2's shareholders received a letter informing them of a Kč 6.51bn payout, of which Kč 5.28bn will go to PPF. It isn't surprising that PPF would rather blame a roaming breakdown on a security breach by a hacker than on low investment and its own high return-on-capital demands. It's common in the corporate world to look for the enemy on the outside, rather than for the enemy within. [Czech Republic hacker telecommunications]