Czech tycoon tied to billion-dollar American retirement wipeout
LUTHMANN NOTE: Radovan Vítek’s story exposes a brutal truth about modern finance: enforcement depends on geography, not justice. The facts laid out by regulators would end careers and freedom in the United States. In Europe, they produced fines and shrugs. American pensions were allegedly looted. A public company was hollowed out. Shell companies were used. Family members allegedly served as fronts. And yet the empire survived intact. Teachers, firefighters, and nurses paid the price while elites insulated themselves behind borders and bureaucracy. This is not a gray-area dispute or a market misstep. It is an accountability failure—one that shows how easily retirement money becomes collateral damage when regulators blink. U.S. federal prosecutors have everything they need to bring a prosecution, including jurisdictional precedent. This piece was first published on TheGatewayPundit.com, and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
By Paul Serran and Frank Parlato
This is the story of Radovan Vítek, a Czech real-estate magnate whose name is little known in the United States but whose alleged conduct has been tied to massive losses for American pension funds.
According to multiple lawsuits and findings by European regulators, more than $1 billion in U.S. pension investments were allegedly stripped through schemes connected to Vítek. Had similar conduct occurred in the United States, it would likely have triggered criminal charges for securities fraud. In Europe, however, the outcome was far different.
European regulators concluded that Vítek used shell companies—some allegedly owned by his own mother—to conceal control over public companies and loot pension-fund assets. While he was fined, he retained control of his business empire and avoided criminal consequences.
Vítek lives primarily in Switzerland but also owns Rydinghurst, a 17th-century manor in Surrey, England. He purchased the estate in 2015 from Ringo Starr for £13.5 million, reportedly so his children could attend school in England. Luxembourg regulators later found that the funds used to buy the property were not derived from legitimate business success, but from assets stripped from ORCO Property Group, a publicly traded real-estate company.
One of ORCO’s major shareholders was Kingstown Capital, which managed more than $1 billion in American pension money. Regulators found that beginning in 2012, Vítek used shell companies and false board actions to seize control of ORCO without proper disclosure.
Once in control, Vítek allegedly operated as a corporate raider, selling off ORCO’s most valuable assets rather than running the company long term. The result was devastating: Kingstown Capital lost approximately 94 percent of its investment, as did JPMorgan and other institutional investors.
ORCO founder Jean-François Ott was found to have acted in concert with Vítek and received more than $18 million in compensation. After control was secured, ORCO sold its most valuable asset—the Endurance Office Fund, worth roughly €330 million—for less than 20 percent of its value to J&T Banka, which regulators described as a front for Vítek.
The remaining Endurance assets were sold to a company called Sidoti. The ORCO board was not informed that Sidoti was secretly owned by Vítek’s mother, Milada Malá. She acquired the fund for €52 million and later sold it to Vítek’s own company, CPI Property Group, for €65 million—yielding her a €13 million profit while transferring hundreds of millions in value back to Vítek.
ORCO’s stock collapsed. Kingstown exited with near-total losses. Regulators concluded that nearly €1 billion in assets had been siphoned from the company.
In 2017, Luxembourg’s financial regulator, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier, ruled that Vítek, Ott, and shell companies tied to Malá had secretly acted “in concert” to seize control of ORCO, violating takeover and transparency laws. The penalty amounted to a fine.
In 2019, Kingstown sued Vítek in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging RICO violations. The case was dismissed in 2020 for lack of jurisdiction, not on the merits.
As a result, American teachers, firefighters, and nurses whose pensions were allegedly looted remain largely unaware that their retirement savings financed a vast real-estate empire—and even a British manor once owned by a Beatle.
According to sources involved, additional legal action is now being organized by those who believe they were defrauded.
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