Daniel Kretinsky: the “Czech sphinx” buying up Europe

Few people outside central Europe had heard of Daniel Kretinsky a decade ago. Now he is one of the continent’s top dealmakers with an eye for helpful connections and cheap assets.

Daniel Kretinsky © TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/Getty Images

(Image credit: Daniel Kretinsky © TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/Getty Images)

When rumours surfaced last autumn that a Czech billionaire named Daniel Kretinsky had taken a stake in Le Monde, "the news sent a tremor through the newsroom of that august national publication", says The New York Times. Journalists noted that he'd built his fortune on power plants and coal mines, while he also owns part of a pipeline bringing Russian gas to the West. Why, they wondered, "would an international energy magnate be interested in an anti-Kremlin newspaper that had invested heavily in covering climate change?"

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.