Jozef Majský in court. (source: TASR)
The controversial Slovak businessman and privatizer Jozef Majský died on Sunday. He was 78.
Majský passed away at the National Oncology Institute in Bratislava, his son told the topky.sk website.
The former billionaire, whose original surname was Marhuľa (Apricot), is infamous due to the 2002 embezzlement case of nonbank financial institutions BMG Invest and Horizont Slovakia.
“The volume of deposits in both companies reached almost 16 billion Slovak crowns. More than 140,000 clients had deposits in them. Many were tempted by interest rates of up to 48 percent,” writes the Index magazine.
In 2015, the Specialised Criminal Court sentenced Majský to nine years in prison in this case. However, Majský used obstructions to delay his prison sentence. The case dragged on until 2020, when he was found in a Prague psychiatric hospital based on a European arrest warrant. The Czech court then ruled that Majský, who also held Czech citizenship, would serve the sentence in Czechia.
The Hlohovec-born Slovak was released from a Czech prison in 2022.
After the fall of the communist regime, he made his first millions of Slovak crowns from trading Russian oil. He also supported political parties, including the semi-authoritarian prime minister Vladimír Mečiar’s HZDS in the nineties. Thanks to this, he obtained the Trnava Car Plants (TAZ), Tatra in Bánovce nad Bebravou, and other smaller engineering companies, writes the aktuality.sk website.
Majský also strengthened his influence through the media. In the early nineties, he owned the national newspaper Smena, which he later sold profitably. Subsequently, he obtained Narodná obroda and other magazines - Lišiak, Profit and TV Komplet. His family also co-owned Radio Twist, which created a platform for the anti-Mečiar opposition in the nineties.
