This is the latest installment in a continuing series on Czech billionaire Radovan Vítek and the financial structure of his publicly traded real estate empire, CPI Property Group. I have been contacted by officials in the Trump administration who have expressed interest in whether Vítek’s conduct impacted American investors, American financial institutions, or American banks. I cannot confirm the existence of any federal investigation at this time. I can say this much: Radovan Vítek may be too big for European regulators. He may not be beyond the reach of American ones.

In 2020, Eurocraft, a shipyard in the Italian port town of Vado Ligure, was running out of money before its shipbuilders could finish Hull 607 for Czech billionaire Radovan Vítek.

They had worked with Vítek before.

In 2011, the yard delivered Hull 507 — a yacht Vítek named Baron Trenck. Hull 607 was to be the sister ship to Baron Trenck, which he planned to name Baron Trenck II.

The Specs

Hull 607 had a beam of 8.2 meters on a hull measuring 43.5 meters long, a length-to-beam ratio of 5.3 to 1 — wide for a vessel of that size. Its width meant she was built for rough weather.

Hull 607 drew three meters of water. She could not enter the shallow harbors of the Riviera or anchor close to the beaches of the Caribbean.

Guests would be ferried ashore by an inflatable boat, carried aboard the yacht itself, operated by crew.

The three meters of depth allowed the ballast to sit low in the hull, lowering the vessel’s center of gravity so that when large waves struck broadside, Hull 607 would steady herself instead of turning violently.

Hull 607 was constructed with a heavy steel hull and aluminum structure above. The steel provides resistance against ice, collision, and hard impact. Aluminum reduces weight higher on the vessel, lowering the center of gravity and reducing roll in rough seas.

Hull 607 was built to cross oceans.

Steel hulls are not like fiberglass. Steel rusts and demands constant maintenance. Corrosion never stops. But a steel hull can absorb impacts that would cripple lighter pleasure craft.

Hull 607 used an icebreaker-style displacement hull reinforced at the bow and designed to ride upward onto pack ice, crushing it beneath the ship’s weight.

It was built for Norwegian winters, Greenland, Svalbard, the Antarctic Peninsula.

Its power came from twin MTU 12V 2000 M60 diesel engines producing a combined 1,632 horsepower. These 12-cylinder marine diesels, rated for medium-continuous duty, could operate for weeks without stopping.

Hull 607 had a range of 11,600 nautical miles at ten knots. The yacht could depart Monaco, cross the Atlantic to the Caribbean, continue across the Pacific to French Polynesia, and arrive in New Zealand without refueling. Months could pass between port calls.

It could stop at sea, instead of port. Hull 607 carried zero-speed stabilizers allowing the vessel to remain stable in open water, reducing the rolling motion that produces seasickness.

It was built for the South Atlantic, the Northwest Passage, Cape Horn.

Inside

Above the hull, were three-decks. The main deck contained a full master suite: private bedroom, two bathrooms, spa pool, shower, walk-in closet, and private office. Beneath it sat four guest cabins, including a full-beam VIP suite.

Forward of the guest quarters were five crew cabins housing the captain and his eight-member crew required to operate and maintain the vessel.

On the main deck, aft of the master suite, was the main saloon and a fully equipped galley, with interior dining and an alfresco dining area on the aft bridge deck above. The bridge deck also held a sky lounge. The sundeck on top carried a glass-shielded Jacuzzi and sunpads arranged beneath open sky.

For a long cruise, the yacht can handle ten guests and nine crew. At anchor in some glamorous bay, it can host a party for 60. The small boats that ferry guests from shore would not stop running until the last guest left.

Wheel house

Crew quarters

The Rescue

The billionaire Vítek wanted the vessel badly enough to intervene when the shipyard began to run out of money.

In November 2020, he lent Eurocraft through one of his shell companies, Polma1, €9.8 million.

In return, Polma1 received 49 percent ownership in the company. Vitek, also through Polma1, advanced another €6.2 million as a deposit toward Hull 607 itself. The shipyard remained open. Wages continued. Construction continued on the yacht.

That same month, Polma1, which Vitek created in Czechia, created its own shell, a Maltese company called BT 2 Vessel Ltd.

Like Polma1, it had no employees, no independent operations, no apparent commercial activity and was devised solely to disguise Vitek’s ownership.

Delivery

Seven months later, on June 25, 2021, Eurocraft completed Hull 607 and delivered it officially into the name of BT 2 Vessel Ltd., Vitek’s Maltese shell company.

That same day, CPI Property Group bought Polma1 from Vítek for €10 million.

CPI was Vítek’s publicly traded real estate company — a €20 billion enterprise with vast holdings of real estate that had borrowed €13 billion from bondholders.

Polma’s assets were 49 percent of Eurcraft and the shell company BT2 which owned Hull 607, which was worth €16 million.

The Yacht That Wasn’t Listed

On CPI’s books, available to stock and bondholders, the word yacht did not appear.

CPI described Polma1 as a real estate company which owned 49 percent of Eurocraft, which appeared in filings merely as “the owner of one building in Italy.”

BT 2 Vessel, the shell holding title to Hull 607, did not appear on the subsidiary list at all.

One month later, on July 27, 2021, CPI transferred BT2 Vessel out of CPI Property Group and into another Vitek shell company, Aspermont S.à r.l., of Luxembourg.

The Duplicate

Some readers may wonder whether the three-shell-company structure was just a sophisticated way for a hard-working billionaire to finance his first yacht.

It was not. Vítek already owned the Baron Trenck — Hull 607’s near-identical predecessor, built by the same Italian shipyard a decade earlier.

He now had two nearly identical superyachts.

Whether he owned one or two yachts, the financing mattered. CPI is a public company issuing bonds to outside investors who believed they were financing European real estate. Those bondholders did not agree to finance the controlling shareholder’s expedition yacht.

Roughly ten percent of the company belonged to outside shareholders. More significant was the company’s debt — approximately 13 billion euros. That debt belonged to bondholders: pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds, and asset managers investing on behalf of millions of ordinary savers.

The money in CPI was not only Vítek’s money. The lenders believed they were financing European real estate.

Vítek did not simply buy himself a yacht the ordinary billionaire way by spending his own money.

In Plain Language

On the day the yacht was delivered, CPI bought Polma1 for €10 million. Polma1 owned BT 2 Vessel, which owned the yacht. The public company now owned a yacht, buried two layers down.

A month later, Vítek had CPI hand BT 2 Vessel to his Luxembourg company Aspermont. The yacht went to him. CPI was left with a piece of paper saying he owed it €8.8 million. He never paid.

Vítek did not just get the yacht for free. He got the yacht and walked away €2.8 million more cash than he had invested.

The bondholders, of course, did not pay for the yacht directly. They had lent CPI billions of euros for European real estate. CPI simply used a small part of that money to buy a yacht for its controlling shareholder.

CPI still owes the bondholders every euro it borrowed. But the company they lent to has €18.8 million in debt without the asset.

It was an example of fraud, perhaps minor, but fraud nonetheless, against the bondholders and stockholders.

He laundered a boat through Polma1, BT 2 Vessel and Aspermont because if CPI openly bought him a yacht, CPI’s auditors and regulators would have stopped it.

So he moved the yacht through three shell companies in three countries. None of the paperwork said the word yacht.

Why Fraud?

Cash flowed out of a public company. A yacht went to the man who controlled the public company. The public company was left without an asset.

The people who paid for the yacht — the bondholders who financed everything CPI did — were never told that this was happening.

The yacht was treated, on the public record, as if it did not exist.

It adds up to one man pocketing a yacht paid for by other people’s money.

The Trouble With Yachts

Vítek owns both yachts today.

Baron Trenck and Baron Trenck II. Two 143-foot expedition superyachts. Sister ships, built ten years apart by the same Italian shipyard. Both moored at Marina di Loano on the Ligurian coast. Both listed for sale.

Baron Trenck has been on the brokerage market for four years. She was originally listed at €13.8 million. She has been refit, repainted, given a new teak deck, and her price has been cut to €9.9 million. She still has not sold.

Baron Trenck II — the yacht the CPI bondholders financed — went on the market in 2024. Fraser Yachts is offering her as a 2022-built explorer yacht “fresh from the shed.” She has not sold either.

Vítek is paying roughly two million euros a year in operating costs on each yacht. Crew salaries. Insurance. Maintenance. Marina fees. Fuel. Roughly four million euros a year in total, on two yachts that neither he can sell nor anyone else seems to want.

The owner who arranged the elaborate maneuver to acquire a duplicate of a yacht he already owned now finds himself the slightly comic figure of a man trying to sell what he so cleverly took.

Hull 607 is not the sort of vessel that drifts lazily between casino harbors beneath Mediterranean sunlight. She is a steel-hulled expedition ship built for distance, isolation, and endurance. Ice-class. Long-range. Capable of crossing oceans without refueling and reaching waters where jurisdiction becomes uncertain, cooperation becomes political, and the horizon itself becomes a form of protection.

Beside her rests an older sister ship with nearly identical capabilities, built by the same yard for the same owner — a matched pair of vessels designed not merely for luxury.

And their owner is not an ordinary yachtsman.

He is a man who has already spent time inside a Czech prison. A man formally cited by Luxembourg’s financial regulator for acting in undisclosed concert during the takeover of a public company. A man whose financial conduct now occupies the attention of international short sellers, investigative journalists, creditors, and — according to sources who contacted this publication — individuals inside the American political apparatus.

Frank Report does not allege that Radovan Vítek intends to flee anything.

We observe only this: If a man wished to possess the ability to leave cooperating jurisdictions quickly, remain indefinitely at sea, move between flags and corporate structures, and place physical distance between himself and investigators, he would acquire precisely the sort of vessels described in this article.

Whether they were ever truly meant for vacation is a question. One perhaps worth asking now — before the answer disappears slowly beyond the horizon, written in diesel smoke, a steel-hull wake, and the cold black water of the open sea.

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