By Frank Parlato

Forbes puts his worth at $7 billion. That ranks him 525th in the world. They call him self-made.

He is 55. Czech. Trained in law. He lives in Crans-Montana in the Swiss Alps, on a plateau above the Rhône Valley. From there you can see the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc.

- Frank Report — Crans Montana in the Swiss Alps

He owns a 17th-century manor in Surrey. He bought it from Ringo Starr so his four children—two boys, two girls—could be educated in England.

His yacht is 143 feet long. It carries a crew of nine.

The yacht is the Baron Trenck, named after a Prussian officer of the eighteenth century. He escaped prison. He wrote of his suffering. He went to Paris to watch the revolution. They cut off his head two days before Robespierre.

His private jet is a Bombardier Global 6000, list price $60 million, range six thousand miles nonstop, cruising altitude 51,000 feet — above the weather, above the traffic, above everything.

The Empire

He owns 89 percent of CPI Property Group. It owns 538 properties. Office towers in Berlin, Prague, Bucharest, and Budapest. The Warsaw Spire, the tallest tower in Poland. Shopping centers and retail parks across Central Europe. Twelve thousand apartments. Hotels in Vienna and Croatia. Old factories in Berlin turned into workspaces.

More than 8,000 businesses pay rent. So do 12,000 households.

CPI brings in €900 million a year.

He says the property is worth $18 billion. There is €9 billion in debt against it.

The Pattern, Before ORCO

Radovan Vítek was born January 22, 1972, in Czechoslovakia. He was 17 when the Soviet empire fell. The state began to sell what it had owned. Factories. Land. Buildings. All of it went cheap to men who moved fast. He was in his early twenties. He started CPI and began to buy.

In 1995 he married Eva Klubková in Brno. They lived in Prague, in a large villa. They had a son.

In October 2004 they separated. Eva asked for €140 million. The tabloids called it the most expensive divorce in the country. It was not.

Vítek moved his assets to his mother, Milada Malá, before the courts could act. Six years later, Eva received €2 million. She went to work for the police.

In 2008, two Czech investors joined Vítek. Marek Čmejla and Jiří Diviš. They had made money in privatization. In 2013 a Swiss court convicted them of fraud tied to a Czech coal company.

They kept their deal quiet. They said their records made them bad for business. No contract. No paper. Only a handshake. They put in more than €320 million over eight years. Vítek ran the investments. The profits were to be split evenly.

When Vítek said there was no deal, they had nothing to show.

In 2009, Vítek married Marie Geidlová. They had three children—two daughters and a son.

In 2012, Vítek bought a farm called Les Dilais near Gordes in Provence. He did it through a Monaco company called Ciskey. Gordes sits on a hill. They call it one of the most beautiful villages in the world.

He filed a permit to renovate a 200-square-meter farmhouse. He paid taxes as if it were still a farmhouse. He did not renovate it. He began to build a palace. He used his partners’ money.

ORCO

ORCO Property Group began in 1993. Jean‑François Ott built it across Central Europe. Its shares traded in Luxembourg, Warsaw, Budapest, Prague, and Paris.

It owned offices and retail across Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Croatia. It managed funds. It was building Zlota 44 in Warsaw, a tall luxury tower designed by Daniel Libeskind.

Then came the financial crisis of 2008. In 2009 ORCO went into French bankruptcy protection. It converted debt into equity.

Kingstown Capital Management and Alchemy Special Opportunities had been creditors. They became shareholders.

There were still assets in ORCO.

ORCO Germany in Berlin. The Endurance Fund with offices across Central Europe. The Warsaw tower. The Mamaison hotels.

Jean-François Ott had built ORCO over twenty years. The crisis took it from him. Creditors became owners. They did not share his vision. By 2012 he was still the chairman, but his control was gone.

The Entry

Beginning in September 2012, Vítek used shells. Gamala Limited. Crestline Ventures. Each stayed just under five percent. No disclosure.

By November, he held 29.65 percent of ORCO. Just under the line that would have forced a full offer to all shareholders.

He needed more votes that did not look like his.

Ott had a duty to the company.

He did something else. Through Stationway, he bought 9 million shares. J&T Banka financed it. The votes went to Vítek. Ott sold them to him. He took €16 million.

Then came more shells. LCE. Levos. Egnaro. Men with banking ties. All clients of J&T. Each bought in turn. Each stayed just below the disclosure line. On paper, they were separate companies. Together, they held 42 percent. It gave Vitek control. None of it disclosed.

Meanwhile, in Provence, the palace work began.

On the farm near Gordes, held through a Monaco shell, the machines moved in. The permit allowed 200 square meters. A farmhouse repair. That is not what Vitek built.

Thirteen hundred square meters of stone in a protected Luberon landscape, built without approval, paid for with money that was not all his.

The Endurance Stripping

vitek cpi chart orco - Frank Report — Back in Luxembourg it went on At ORCO Vítek went after the Endurance Fund It held €330 million in office buildings for pension funds and insurers He used JT Banka There were side agreements The bank bought units from investors without saying Vitek was behind it Dutch pensions Estonian banks Insurance money They did not know Vitek was the buyer

Ott, as chairman, pushed the ORCO board to sell its own units to the bank in January 2013. The board did not know Vitek was the buyer.

Then came Sidoti. A Czech shell company secretly owned by Vítek’s mother, Milada Malá. Sidoti offered to buy the whole portfolio. Others bid higher. Danish funds put up more money.

Ott and Vitek made sure Sidoti bought €330 million in assets for €52 million. Two months later Sidoti sold them to CPI for €65 million. His mother took €13 million.

The original investors were left with sixteen cents on the euro.

The Mountain

In 2013, Vítek bought the ski lifts at Crans-Montana. It was an old resort in Valais. It had been losing competitive ground to ski resorts in Verbier, Zermatt, and Gstaad.

It needed money. Vitek skied there. The locals knew him. They welcomed him. He bought the lifts. The parking. The restaurants. The shops. They thought he would save the place.

He understood something they did not. Whoever owned the lifts owned the mountain. If the lifts stopped, everything stopped.

The money he promised did not come.

The Board Vote

At ORCO, in 2013, the fight came out in the open.

Kingstown Capital Management and Alchemy pushed back. Their men on the board, Guy Shanon and Ian Cash, warned shareholders. They tried to force a capital increase that would dilute Vítek.

He blocked it. ORCO kept losing money.

In November, at a board meeting, Ott made a move. It was not on the agenda. He proposed a €100 million capital increase at ORCO Germany. The price was 47 cents a share. Six months earlier, Rothschild & Co had valued the same shares at 80 cents.

The difference between 47 cents and 80 cents is 33 cents. Across 114 million shares that is approximately €35 million.

The vote needed support. It came from Ott and Edward Hughes, a supposedly independent board member. Undisclosed when he voted was that Hughes had been paid more than €3 million by Vítek. Without his vote, it would have failed.

It passed. Taken from ORCO and its shareholders in a single board resolution, on a Sunday afternoon, without prior notice on the agenda, on the votes of a bought “independent” director Vitek pocketed €35 million.

On December 4, 2013, Vítek bought 114 million ORCO Germany shares at 47 cents. Six months earlier, Rothschild & Co had valued them at 80.

In March 2014, Ott bought another 76.6 million at the same price. J&T Banka financed it. He sold them to Vítek three months later.

That made 190 million shares. The discount was 33 cents. About €63 million moved from the shareholders to Vítek. ORCO recorded a loss of €65.5 million.

On January 6, 2014, Vítek called another meeting. He moved to remove Shanon and Cash. The Cyprus shells voted with him. Ott abstained. It was enough. They were gone.

By June 2014, Vítek controlled ORCO Germany. By August, ORCO Germany had a new name: CPI Property Group.

In 2015, Forbes put him on the list for the first time. A billionaire. Net worth $1.98 billion. Self-made.

The Verdict

In January 2017, Luxembourg’s regulator finished its report. The finding was simple. Vítek, Ott, and the shells had acted together in secret. They took control of ORCO in violation of the law. The gain for Vitek was about €1 billion.

The fine was €1 million.

Ott, who had misled his board for years and took €16 million to leave, was fined €12,000.

Meanwhile, back in the Alps.

In 2018, Vítek said the town of Crans-Montana owed him CHF 800,000. They argued it.

He shut the lifts during peak season. Overnight, the cables stopped. The gondolas hung still. The hotels emptied. The restaurants lost the winter. The workers had no employment.

A billionaire closed a mountain over less than a million francs.

Two weeks later, the lifts ran again.

In 2024, Vail Resorts paid CHF 118.5 million — approximately $130 million — for 84% of the operation and eleven restaurants. Vail immediately announced CHF 30 million in infrastructure investment over five years. That was the money Vítek had never spent in a decade of ownership. He shut the mountain down over one million francs. He sold it for $130 million.

Swiss prosecutors opened an investigation. It went nowhere. Six years passed.

Partners Unpaid

Back in the Czech Republic, Čmejla and Diviš had put up more than €320 million on a handshake. It built Vitek’s rise.

He used their money. Then he said there was no deal.

He made one payment under what they called a buyout. That was Vitek’s mistake. You do not pay on an agreement that does not exist.

In 2019 they sued in New York. Judge Denise Cote dismissed it. Not on the facts. On the forum. She took the allegations as true and laid them out. She said the case belonged in Luxembourg.

It moved. They kept waiting.

In November 2023, Carson Block put out a report through Muddy Waters Research. He said CPI bonds were worth less than they traded. He said the values were too high. He said there were deals between companies tied to Vitek.

Short sellers bet on a fall. They are paid to be right. The bonds dropped. Moody’s and S&P Global cut CPI’s rating.

Soon after, Vitek created new entities in Abu Dhabi to hold assets away from European courts.

By late 2024, Vítek and Marie Geidlová were separating. Both moved to grab assets. Vitek put CPI shares into a family trust for the younger children. He moved other stakes to lawyers. She tried to move fourteen apartments in Brno into a Liechtenstein foundation she had set up.

The police stopped her. His transfers went through. Hers did not.

A creditor connected to J&T Bank moved to seize part of his Czech real estate portfolio — approximately €80 million. Enforcement proceedings in a divorce allow creditors to act fast, before assets can be moved. Someone connected to the bank that financed the ORCO theft a decade earlier was now positioned as a creditor picking through the wreckage of his marriage.

Whether J&T was acting against Vítek or with him — helping move assets under the cover of a legal proceeding — is a question the public record cannot answer.

The divorce was final in March 2025. The settlement came in July, before a London court.

The Palace

Back in Provence, the farmhouse had become a palace. On the land near Gordes, the permit allowed 200 square meters. What he built was 1,300. Two floors. A basement. A pool inside. A cellar. Terraces. All of it in protected ground.

The neighbors complained. The town did nothing.

On January 9, 2025, the Court of Appeal of Nîmes ordered it torn down within six months. The builders were fined €350,000. Vítek appealed. The deadline passed in July. The building stood.

The fine is €500 a day. Less than an hour of his jet. Cheaper than doing it right from the start.

By March 2025, Canal9 reported that Vítek faced enforcement for more than CHF 60 million in debts tied to the Czech Republic. Swiss assets could be seized.

At the same time, CPI carried €9 billion in debt. It valued its property at €18 billion. That was its own number. Others put it closer to €12 billion. At €12 billion, the equity was about €3 billion.

The leverage told the rest. Net debt to EBITDA stood near twelve. Twelve years of earnings to pay the debt, if nothing else was spent. A sound company runs near eight.

About €1 billion in bonds comes due in 2026. In 2026, he needs €1 billion in cash.

He can sell buildings into a market that knows he has to sell. He can borrow at high rates Or he can sell the whole company and take what he is given.

There is a Pattern to It

Ott built ORCO. He lost it to creditors. He sold his cooperation to the man taking it apart. Kingstown became an owner by force and watched control slip away. The people at Crans-Montana welcomed a buyer who would save the mountain and saw him shut it down over a small sum before selling out. In Gordes, a farmhouse became a palace while the town did nothing, and now the fine runs while the order stands idle.

Eva asked for €140 million. She received €2 million. She went to work.

Marie tried to move fourteen apartments into a foundation. The police stopped her. His transfers went through.

Then, to top it all off, in November 2024, a Cypriot court acted. It froze €537 million of Vítek’s assets. The claim came from Čmejla and Diviš. Sixteen years after the start.

Courts do not freeze assets lightly. They do it when a claim looks real, and the money might vanish before judgment.

The court looked at the claim. That he took their capital. Built with it. Said there was no deal. Made one payment. Then denied that too.

They had waited 16 years. While they waited, he built. And kept a billion.

While they waited, Luxembourg fined him €1 million and left him the rest. While they waited, he bought the manor, named the yacht, and flew above the weather.

The Score

The freeze came. The bond attack. The order in France. The ratings fall. The divorce. The assets moving.

It was all in motion.

By June 2025, Bloomberg reported he might sell CPI. J&T Banka was named as the possible buyer.

The same bank had financed the fronts. It had extended the credit. It had bought the shares while keeping Vitek hidden.

There are two ways to see it. One is simple. The bank knows the assets. It knows the debt. It knows the freeze. It knows the ruling. A buyer who knows all that does not pay full price. A seller who needs cash can’t refuse.

The other way is it’s the same play, run again. A low sale. Debt turned into equity. Control taken. The value moved. The new holders left where the last ones stood. Vitek keeps the assets and the bond holders convert to equity and are again squeezed out for pennies on the dollar.

Criminal Charges?

He has not been charged anywhere. But the exposure is real.

The build at Gordes was not a zoning dispute. It was construction in protected land. That is a crime. A false permit was filed. Taxes were paid as if it were a farmhouse. The palace stands.

Switzerland opened a case on the capital raising. No public announcement has been made.

The United States has jurisdiction.

Kingstown Capital Management lost money set out in a European report and accepted as true by a federal judge. Euro deals clear through American banks. If money moved through Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, or Bank of New York Mellon, it can make a case. It has been done before.

And there are victims. Tens of thousands of Americans saw their pension statements fall slightly in Kingston. Not much. Less than a hundred dollars. Most did not notice. Few asked why.

The teachers taught. The nurses worked. The firefighters showed up. They thought it was the market. It was not the market. The bonds trade. The jet still flies. The yacht sails. The palace stands.