Daniel Kretinsky likes things that others discard. The Czech billionaire has spent a decade assembling an empire stretching from power plants to retail and media where most of the recent purchases shared one thing in common: they were financially distressed.
Armed with a war chest that has made him one of the most prominent dealmakers in Europe, he is now taking advantage of the record profit his energy business is churning out to snap up companies pressured by high debt. Besides winning a deal to gain control of troubled French supermarket chain Casino Guichard Perrachon SA in a multi-billion-euro restructuring process last month, he has announced investments in sectors as diverse as technology and book publishing.
The 48-year-old owner of the largest privately-held energy conglomerate in Europe has a net worth of about $8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, buoyed mainly by a bumper year for power utilities during the continent’s energy crisis. His main company, the Prague-based Energeticky a Prumyslovy Holding AS, had €37 billion ($40.1 billion) of revenue last year, a fourfold leap since 2020, and expects its business to keep growing.
Read the full story on Bloomberg here.