part 1: Vítek’s $7.2B Question: Where Did the Money Come From?
part 2 CZECH, PLEASE: Vitek Hid the Payout He Owed for 3 Years
PART 3: VITEK: THE PHANTOM
Radovan Vítek is 55. He was a teenager when the Soviet empire fell.Forbes estimates his fortune at $7 billion. That makes him the 566th richest person in the world.
He is reportedly the sixth richest Czech.
He does not give interviews. He does not seek publicity. He rarely appears in public.
In November 2023, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung called him a phantom.
Vítek owns about 87 percent of CPI Property Group. It is registered in Luxembourg and trades in Frankfurt. CPI says it owns more than €20 billion in real estate.
Forbes does not independently appraise the buildings. Its calculation relies on CPI’s reported valuation.
The debt is about €13 billion. The debt is known because it is a matter of public record
If the properties are worth €20 billion and the debt is €13 billion, the equity is about €7 billion. If the first number is right, Forbes is right.
If the portfolio is worth €15 billion, the equity falls to about €2 billion. Short sellers say CPI values the buildings above what buyers would pay. If they are right, much of the fortune is an accounting assumption.
If they are right, much of the fortune is only an inflated number on the books.
NOTHING IN HIS NAME
CPI owns offices and buildings across Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Vienna, Budapest and Bucharest, along with shopping centers, hotels and roughly 12,000 apartments.
He built the company, although critics and litigants dispute how some of its most important assets were acquired. He owns nearly all of it. Officially, he does not run it.
He has no executive position in CPI.
The NZZ identified this as a governance problem. It compared Vítek with René Benko of Signa, another controlling figure who exercised enormous influence while formally holding no position in the company he had built.
The comparison was intended as a warning. Within days, events made it look like a prediction.
Days later, Signa collapsed into the largest bankruptcy in postwar Austrian history. Creditors were left pursuing approximately €27.6 billion.
On October 15, 2025, an Austrian court in Innsbruck convicted Benko of creditor fraud.
On July 2, 2026, Austria’s Supreme Court upheld the two-year sentence, exhausting Benko’s appeal. It separately ordered a retrial concerning €360,000 in payments connected with a house in Innsbruck.
The conduct Benko was convicted of: giving €300,000 to his mother in 2023, when Signa was already in financial difficulty, to keep it from creditors.
The number to remember is €300,000.
THE OTHER MOTHER
Milada Malá is Vítek’s mother. The record identifies her as the registered owner of Czech Property Investments, Tandis, and Sidoti.
In 2013, Sidoti bought a property portfolio carried at about €330 million for €52.53 million. It sold the portfolio to Vítek’s company and made €13.09 million. The deal was part of the ORCO transactions later examined by Luxembourg’s regulator.
Sidoti bought the portfolio. Milada Malá owned Sidoti. Milada Malá is Vítek’s mother.
None of it was disclosed.
ORCO’s shareholders were not told that the buyer was owned by the mother of one of ORCO’s own shareholders.
Vítek did not tell them who the buyer really belonged to. And according to the regulator, nobody told them there were better offers on the table either.
What they were told was that the portfolio was going for €52.53 million. It was valued at roughly €330 million.
Sidoti sold it to Vítek’s company. It made €13.09 million.
It is important to separate what Malá did from what her son allegedly concealed. Buying property cheaply is not a crime. The potential wrongdoing lies in Vitek hiding the ownership, failing to disclose the family relationship and withholding better offers. The purchase itself is ordinary commerce.
A portfolio carried at €330 million passed through Vítek's mother's company and out the other side. Nothing has happened yet except a lot of ORCO stockholders got swindled out of about €270 million.
Vitek used his mother, or at least her name.
THE DIVORCE
Vítek married Eva Klubková in Brno in 1995. They separated in October 2004.
According to court reporting in Prague, she filed for a settlement of 3.63 billion Czech crowns — about €140 million at the time. Some Czech outlets have reported the claim as considerably higher.
Vítek moved everything to his mother's name. Eva walked away with 50 million crowns, about €2 million. Afterward, according to a Czech tabloid interview with Vítek's former driver, she took a job with the police.
A court valued Vítek's assets at 40 billion crowns — roughly $2 billion.
But the fortune officially belonged to his mother. He appeared in the proceedings as a man without assets, because formal ownership of his companies had been transferred to his mother.
To fund the fight, Eva signed a blank promissory note to a company called Merone, which was to take a quarter of any award.
Merone later came after her for non-payment.
A Prague court issued a payment order against her in 2011. It was canceled in 2015.
Vítek publicly called it an attempted fraud against his ex-wife and said he was fighting on her side. A man who stripped his assets to keep her from them, then defending her against the people she hired to get them — that's the strangest turn in the whole account.
Eva got one-eighth of one percent. On paper, Vitek's money belonged to his mother.
SOMEBODY CAN EXPLAIN THE DIFFERENCE
Today Milada Malá is Defendant No. 7 in a case before the District Court of Nicosia, subject to a worldwide freezing order. But that is another story for another day. It is the story of how Vitek got his financial start by letting two partners fund his initial purchases of real estate and how he stiffed them, and now, years later, they are suing Vitek and his mother and other nominees he has used to hide his money and allegedly to take the 300 million that gave him his start.
Collodi wrote that stolen fruit never fructifies in his moral fable Pinocchio. Vitekcchio may learn it yet.
Austria put a billionaire in prison over €300,000 moved to his mother. Here we have another mother and assets, with considerably more zeroes.
WHAT THE MONEY BOUGHT
Vítek lives at Crans-Montana in the Swiss Alps, on a plateau above the Rhône valley. He also owned the resort's ski lifts and once closed them in the middle of the season during a dispute with the municipality over less than a million francs.
Great wealth does not abolish small quarrels. It enlarges their consequences. Many small businesses and seasonal workers had to do without that season in a town that relies on tourism during the skiing season.
The lifts were the engine of the town's only season, and he had bought them. The dispute was worth less than a million francs. What it cost the shopkeepers and seasonal workers was never tallied.
If there is an opposite phrase for noblesse oblige, somebody please furnish it and put Vitek's picture alongside it.
Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi. "What is permitted to Jupiter is not permitted to the ox."
Below Vitek's Surrey home purchased from Ringo Starr.
Vitek paid £13.5 million for a seventeenth-century manor in Surrey formerly owned by Ringo Starr, reportedly so his four children could attend school in England.
He owns two 143-foot steel expedition yachts, built a decade apart by the same Italian shipyard. Both are for sale. Neither has sold. Their upkeep is estimated at roughly €4 million a year.
He flies a Bombardier Global 6000.
In Provence, Vítek obtained permission to renovate a 200-square-meter farmhouse. He built a 1,300-square-meter stone palace. France's highest court made the demolition order final in June 2026. The building remains standing, unfinished and empty. Vítek has never spent a night there.
THE VERB IN THE SENTENCE
Forbes first placed Vítek on its billionaire list in 2015, estimating his fortune at $1.98 billion. By April 2019, the figure was $3.5 billion. By March 2026, it was $7.2 billion. Wealth doubled, then doubled again.
The great increase in wealth came after the ORCO takeover.
Before ORCO, Vítek was a regional property operator with limited access to capital.
Luxembourg's financial regulator, the CSSF, examined the arrangements between Vítek and ORCO's founder, Jean-François Ott, and found they produced a benefit to Vítek of roughly €1 billion — at the expense of the company's investors and creditors.
To describe the billion-euro fortune without describing that sequence is to remove the verb from the sentence.
Biography often becomes clearer when chronology is restored.
Forbes has a word for this. Self-made.
It is a busy word.
PUT IT IN SOMEBODY ELSE'S NAME
The next nine parts of this series describe many transactions, but the principle is simple: ownership is made less visible by placing the asset in another person's name.
The mother. The lawyer. The dentist. The private investigator. The son. The nominee director in South Africa. The pension fund. The bank.
It is quite a cast for a story about one man's property.
The recurrence of intermediaries becomes, eventually, the pattern itself.
The recurring object is distance. Not his name when another name will serve. Not his signature where another signature can intervene. Yet when the documents are followed through the companies and nominees, the money ends in a Czech bank account belonging to Radovan Vítek.
And that last line is not rhetoric. A European regulator traced the money there.
That is how we know. Phantom notwithstanding.
A Manhattan fund predicted exactly how Radovan Vítek would strip ORCO. All three predictions came true within 30 months. The regulator later agreed.
A Czech billionaire built a secret 14,000 sq ft palace in France's prettiest village on a permit for a farmhouse. Now a court says tear it down.