The Ostrava Regional Court today started bankruptcy proceedings with the companies Vítkovice Power Engineering and Vítkovice Mechanika of the engineering group Vítkovice Holding of entrepreneur Jan Světlík. The proposal was submitted by the company Brno Wetag Invest and PRH Estate from the Wetag group. Wetag said buying the receivables of the two companies was a business opportunity. According to Vítkovice, not a single company is in a bankruptcy situation. The group is said to want to quickly demonstrate that it has the money to pay off theoretical claims.
According to Wetag media representative Radka Háčková, a claim of nearly six million crowns against the company Vítkovice Power Engineering and a claim of 475 thousand crowns against the company Vítkovice Mechanika were registered in bankruptcy proceedings.
Wetag claims that it is currently entering into agreements with other suppliers whose claims will be attached to the proposed bankruptcy proposal. “On this day alone, 13 creditors contacted us with claims of tens of millions of crowns,” said Háčková.
At the same time, he dismissed speculation that entrepreneur David Beran or Karel Komárek’s KKCG group might be behind the bankruptcy proposal. Beran has a dispute with Světlík over a stake in Vítkovice Holding, KKCG is a minority shareholder of the Světlík engineering group. “Our business activities are strictly and only our business activities. They have nothing to do with Pak Beran or the KKCG group,” he said.
Creditors do not deal with Vítkovices
The commercial director of the Vítkovice group, Jiří Skuhra, stated that the alleged creditors did not negotiate with Vítkovices, nor did they check whether they could pay the claims. “It makes no sense. This is an advertising trick, most of our claims cannot be validly established,” he said. Vítkovice asked suppliers to be very careful when establishing claims, because, in their opinion, they risk that the transfer action was unauthorized in the first place.
However, according to Wetag, everything is in order from a legal point of view. “From the analysis of the contract documentation for each individual claim, it can be concluded that there are no restrictions for the creditor to forward this claim,” said Háčková. “We advise those who are unable to sell their claims to join the bankruptcy process on their own with their claims. All claims filed for bankruptcy are of course valid, acknowledged by the debtor and past due for more than 90 days,” he added.
“The Vítkovice Machinery Group owns 34 companies and there is no indication that they will be unable to pay their obligations from the business relationship,” said Kijonková. According to him, the group is currently working to prove to the courts very quickly that they can also afford the theoretical claims of the Wetag group.
Vítkovice Power Engineering is a key component of the Vítkovice Holding group. Last year, the group had a turnover of about 14 billion crowns and a consolidated profit of 479 million crowns. The main owner of the group is Jan Světlík. Group companies employ 8,000 people.
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