"Pirate of Prague" released on bail in Bahamas

Apr 28, 2007, 15:07 GMT

Prague - A Czech-born businessman dubbed the Pirate of Prague has been released on 300,000-dollar bail in the Bahamas, reports said Saturday.

Viktor Kozeny, 43, also has an Irish passport and had been held in the Bahamas Fox Hill prison since October 2005.

In 2003, the New York City District Attorney charged Kozeny with defrauding his clients of 182 million dollars in an 1998 oil privatization deal he was to seal for them in Azerbaijan.

Kozeny is now appealing a September ruling by a Bahamas court to extradite him to the United States where he faces 25 years in prison if convicted.

The Czech Republic requested Kozeny's extradition in 2005 to try him for embezzling around 16 billion koruny (569 million euros) from a privatization fund that he had established to take part in mass privatizations of state-owned property after the fall of communism.

Kozeny embodies the dark side of the early 1990s privatization sweep in then Czechoslovakia. Every person over 18 years could buy vouchers worth 1,000 koruny and invest them in privatization funds such as that founded by Kozeny.

A Harvard University graduate, Kozeny named his fund after his alma mater, and promised Czechs a 10-fold return on their investment which attracted many buyers. He was first dubbed the 'Pirate of Prague' in Fortune magazine in 1997.

Before turning fugitive, the flashy financier won praise from the authors of the voucher privatization, then finance minister and now Czech President Vaclav Klaus.