The heads of the political groups in the EU Parliament did not completely clear the way for the committee reform yesterday. They actually wanted to turn the previous subcommittees Security and Defense (SEDE) and Public Health (SANT) into full committees. In addition, there are to be two special committees limited to twelve months: for combating the housing shortage (Housing) and for strengthening democracy (Democracy Shield). However, there were still complications at last night’s Conference of Presidents. The aim now is to obtain approval by written procedure by Monday in order to vote in plenary during the week in Strasbourg.
Parliamentarians had already decided to upgrade the former AFET subcommittee SEDE to a full committee in the summer when the party families of the Von der Leyen coalition negotiated the personnel package for the top jobs. The competencies are reflected in the mandates. It is clear that SEDE will not only receive competencies from AFET but also from the ITRE industry committee.
This is to ensure that Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius, whose main area of responsibility is the defense industry, meets a suitable committee in Parliament – in the form of the SEDE full committee under the leadership of Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP). High Representative Kaja Kallas, Mediterranean Commissioner Dubravka Suica, and Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos will then appear in the AFET, under the leadership of David McAllister (CDU).
We need to make a correction to our Editorial from yesterday’s edition on the visit of Minister Robert Habeck to Brussels: There, Habeck spoke of the “contradiction” between the debt rules and the goal of higher defense spending. Since the Draghi report, it has been clear that additional investments in the three-digit billion range are necessary. He then went on to say that the EU debt rules might have turned out differently if this knowledge had been available beforehand. This indirect quote comes from Habeck and not from Federal Finance Minister Jörg Kukies, as we had mistakenly written. We apologize for this oversight.
Get the day off to a good start!
Without more efficient use of industrial process heat, the European climate targets can hardly be achieved. This is because the main source of emissions in the industrial sector is the combustion of fossil fuels – primarily gas – to generate heat in production processes for food, paper, chemicals, steel and cement. According to a report published this Thursday by the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP) think tank, significant greenhouse gas emissions could be avoided by electrifying industrial processes.
It shows that only three percent of process heat was electrified in 2020 – with the remainder being generated using fossil fuels. The RAP experts write that up to 60 percent could already be electrified using commercially available technologies today. By 2035, the potential is even 90 percent. Barriers to faster electrification are:
RAP therefore proposes an EU electrification directive for industry to achieve 60 percent electrification by 2050. The European Commission must improve the economic framework conditions, for example through energy and carbon pricing, tax incentives and targeted support to reduce the investment risk, they say.
Moreover, better grid planning and more research and development funding are needed. “In order to leverage the electrification potential in the German industry, it is important to reform the grid fees and foster more flexibility,” says Jan Rosenow, RAP Director and scientist at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. Until now, major industrial electricity consumers have received discounts for constant demand. “However, with the advent of variable renewable energy sources, we should move to dynamic, time-varying grid charges that reflect the true cost of transmitting electricity and encourage flexible energy use.”
The industrial sector is responsible for up to 20 percent of global carbon emissions. In Europe, over 65 percent of energy is consumed in industrial applications for processes such as drying, bleaching, sterilization and distillation. And a large proportion of this valuable heat is lost by being released unused into the environment. The company Susheat now aims to change this.
One way to use industrial waste heat more efficiently and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to use high-temperature heat pumps. A new research project by Susheat aims to bring about such an efficiency revolution in the energy consumption of the European industry and drive decarbonization in this sector. Susheat’s developers plan to recover and reuse 75 percent or more of the heat from industries such as food and beverage, paper and petrochemicals.
A recently published study estimates that heat pumps delivering temperatures of up to 250 degrees Celsius could reduce Europe’s industrial emissions by around 20 million tons of CO2 annually and play a “significant” role in achieving the EU’s climate targets. The system consisting of a new type of heat pump with a storage system could also be ready for use in one to two years – provided the political framework conditions and financing costs are right.
Silvia Trevisan and Mateo Sanclemente Lozano are researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. Their university is among the 14 companies and universities involved in Susheat, located in countries such as Romania, Italy, Austria and the UK, Trevisan and Lozano told Table.Briefings. Using a latest-generation Stirling engine, built by the Norwegian company Enerin, they use waste heat and convert it into temperatures of up to 250 degrees.
KTH researchers combine the heat pump with a storage system that partly mimics the shape and function of the human lung. The system has been developed by the Universitat de Lleida (Spain) and can store heat for several hours, providing more flexibility and heat on demand.
In order to be even more flexible and efficient, these new industrial heat pump and heat storage technologies are connected to a solar thermal power plant and an AI management system. The aim is to reuse as much waste heat as possible. In parallel, the technology package is designed for use in different countries with varying electricity prices and conditions.
“You can also achieve temperatures between 200 and 250 degrees with concentrated solar energy,” says Trevisan. In a country like Italy, with abundant sunshine but expensive electricity, you would use more concentrated solar heat and produce less with the heat pump. “In a country like Norway, where the sun shines less but electricity is cheap and environmentally friendly, you can use the industrial heat pump more.”
Commercial industrial high-temperature heat pumps capable of reaching 250 degrees could be available in one to two years. “The integrated system will take longer because the management is more complex – perhaps four to five years,” says Trevisan.
Perhaps the biggest challenges are the capital costs for the new technologies and the government’s incentives. “The technology could be a game changer,” says Trevisan. “Much of the challenge is probably more related to the capital costs and the amortization periods that the industry is willing to accept.”
The European Heat Pump Association shares this view. Most EU countries, as well as Norway, Switzerland and the UK, offer government incentives, but there are also obstacles – including a lack of awareness of the potential of the new technology. For this reason, the association calls on the EU Commission to place these new technologies at the heart of its Industrial Decarbonization Accelerator Act, which is due to be published soon.
Despite new liquefaction capacities for LNG, the industry expects supply to remain tight. “The market will remain tight for the next two to three years,” said Laurent David, spokesman for the International Association of LNG Importers (GIIGNL), at the World LNG Summit in Berlin on Wednesday.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects global liquefaction capacities to grow by six percent by the end of 2025. However, the participants in Berlin made it clear that they also expect global demand to increase for several reasons.
Data centers & AI: In Malaysia and other Southeast Asian countries, data centers are driving up electricity consumption, and this needs to be covered by either renewables or gas, said Alan Heng, CEO of Pavilion Energy from Singapore. In any case, the gas industry sees itself as a competitor to nuclear power. The latter is favored by many Silicon Valley companies. Andrew Elliot from ExxonMobil is convinced that carbon capture is the only competitive and available technology to supply low-carbon electricity for data centers at all times.
Supplement to renewables & nuclear: “We still need a centralized backup and that brings you to LNG. Batteries and hydrogen is not enough,” said Javier Moret, Global Head of LNG at RWE. The Essen-based company is also using similar arguments to promote a centralized capacity market in Germany. However, nuclear power plants are also dependent on peak load from gas, said Takeuchi Atsunori from Tokyo Gas. In Taiwan, on the other hand, the last remaining nuclear power plant will be decommissioned in 2025, meaning that more gas will be needed, said Jane Liao from energy company CPC.
Shipping: In Singapore, the use of LNG in shipping has grown exponentially this year, reported Heng from Pavilion Energy. With affordable prices, this development is set to continue.
China and other countries are in the process of increasing their regasification capacities, summarized Anatol Feygin from the Texan exporter Cheniere. “We will earn our money in tight times,” said Feygin. Conference President Pat Roberts emphasized the role that terminals and pipelines play once they have been built: “From my experience over the last 20 years, I can say that once the infrastructure is in place, there will be opportunities to use it.”
It is true that many participants committed to decarbonization. However, concrete announcements were almost completely absent. Nnamdi Anowi from Nigeria LNG reported on a study on the financial viability of CCS. Only one to two dozen participants attended the first “World Renewable Fuels Conference” – a fraction of those in the main conference hall. Not a single NGO representative took part in a panel on decarbonization.
The European methane regulation is set to be an important first step towards decarbonization. Over the next few years, it will ban the venting and flaring of natural gas from extraction in the EU, combat methane leaks and at least oblige importers to report on emissions. The latter is not a mission impossible, emphasized Georges Tijbosch from the MiQ certification initiative.
So far, however, it has mainly been large gas companies that have been concerned with the greenhouse gas footprint of their production. “Many suppliers have no idea where their molecules come from,” said Feygin from Cheniere. From the European regulation, Tijbosch from MiQ expects a permissible leakage rate of 0.2 percent from production alone in the future: “Many companies that we certify are below this. However, the average in the USA is much higher.”
Venting and flaring were widely used for a long time in the Permian Basin in Texas, for example, where natural gas is partly a by-product of oil production. Small producers found the cost of gas pipelines too high, so they simply flared the gas.
Under Donald Trump, the US is expected to roll back regulation. “It’s clear that the new administration wants to eliminate methane,” said Christopher Goncalves from the Berkeley Research Group on a panel. The withdrawal of methane regulation will come quickly because the government will not have to go through the US Congress.
However, Goncalves also sees two opposing movements. In Democrat-ruled California and other blue states, it will be difficult for Trump to change policy. In addition, many gas pipelines are now under construction in the Permian Basin. “Companies will now want to export more LNG, and perhaps the most important way to prevent gas wastage is to bring it to market.”
His critics have already given Daniel Křetínskýs (49) many labels: The “Czech Sphinx,” he was called by the Financial Times. The French journalist Jérôme Lefilliâtre called him the “garbage collector of Europe” in a biography. This is because Křetínský acquired Mitteldeutsche Braunkohlengesellschaft (Mibrag) in 2009 and Leag in Lusatia in 2016. By purchasing the coal companies, the billionaire became one of the biggest air polluters in Europe.
Now there is another characterizing metaphor: “Buttoned up like an oyster” is how he describes his concrete plans for the Thyssenkrupp steel subsidiary TKSE, said Jürgen Kerner in an interview with Table.Briefings. However, the second chairman of IG Metall and member of the Supervisory Board of Thyssenkrupp AG has a very differentiated impression of Křetínský.
Daniel Křetínský already holds a fifth of the shares in TKSE, with an option for a further 30 percent. “When I send him a message, he responds immediately,” says Kerner. “That’s very polite.” But there is still no discussion about the important issues.
Without a binding discussion, it remains unclear whether Křetínský wants to invest his own money in the Group in order to enable the restructuring and ecological transformation of Germany’s largest steel group, which is in deficit. “Every week that goes by without such a conversation feeds doubt in me and my colleagues that he is the right owner,” warns Kerner. Yet the Czech is actually “a very approachable person” with whom it is easy to talk “about many different topics on a meta-level.”
Sigmar Gabriel describes the investor in a very similar way in an interview with Table.Briefings: “I got to know Mr. Křetínský as an extraordinarily knowledgeable and very good analyst,” says the former Federal Minister of Economic Affairs, who resigned from his position as Chairman of the TKSE Supervisory Board in late summer in a dispute with the ThyssenKrupp Executive Board. At the time, Gabriel even recommended that Křetínský should take over TKSE completely – a statement that the former Minister did not want to repeat.
According to the Forbes Rich List, Křetínský is one of the three richest Czechs with 9.4 billion US dollars, and his company holdings are estimated to be five times that amount. As the son of a computer science professor and a constitutional judge, there are several fortunate circumstances that explain how he came to this wealth: firstly, after studying law and gaining his doctorate at Masaryk University in Brno, he met Patrik Tkác and Petr Kellner.
Tkác, a successful banker from Slovakia, brought Křetínský into his investment company J&T in 1999 and made him a partner in 2003. Together they founded the holding company EPH in 2009 and initially became involved in the fossil energy business in Central Eastern Europe. Kellner, for his part, had bought up apparently worthless shares in the former state-owned companies with his Dutch-registered fund PPF during the so-called coupon privatization after the fall of communism in the Czech Republic and made a fortune in the process. Křetínský was in a relationship with Kellner’s daughter Anna for many years, and with her father’s help, he built up the convoluted EPH company empire.
It also benefited enormously from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since then, not only have the coal-fired power plants in eastern Germany and elsewhere been profitable, but according to the Czech NGO Re-Set, the profits from the transit of natural gas from Siberia to Western Europe, which EPH’s majority shareholding in Eustream collects, have also increased. The Ukrainian government was just as unenthusiastic about this as it was about the continuing business of the Düsseldorf-based retail group Metro in Russia. Křetínský had bought into the struggling Metro in 2018.
Today, Daniel Křetínský owns a complex network of companies throughout Europe. He holds stakes in supermarket chains such as Sainsbury (UK) and Casino (France), soccer clubs such as Westham United and Sparta Prague, and the Dutch postal service. In France, he bought the left-wing magazine Marianne and the second-largest publishing house Editis in addition to the magazine Elle. In his home country, his Czech News Center has a third of the media market, including the tabloid Blesk.
According to Křetínský’s numerous opponents from the environmentalist scene, this paper in particular has repeatedly denied climate change – supposedly fitting for an investor who has made a large part of his fortune from fossil fuels. One prominent opponent is EU Commissioner Jozef Síkela. During his time as Czech Minister of Industry and Trade, he fended off Křetínský’s takeover attempt of pipeline operator Net4Gas and nationalized the company. Síkela felt unfairly pressured by negative reporting in Blesk. Křetínský now presents himself as a climate protector and claims to want to promote the energy transition with his companies.
Daniel Křetínský’s business strategy is to buy up companies in crisis at low prices. He then usually holds them for years. Unlike many other investors, he does not usually break them up into individual parts. But he also often does not invest on a large scale in order to get the companies back on the road to success. However, Kerner, an IG Metall employee, is still hoping for this for TKSE.
However, Křetínský’s spokesman Daniel Častvaj denied that Křetínský is withdrawing profits, as a Greenpeace report on Leag recently suggested. “As shareholders, we have not yet received a single euro of profit as a dividend,” Častvaj wrote to Table.Briefings. “All profits are reinvested in the company.” Otherwise, he asked for understanding that an interview with Křetínský on Leag or TKSE is currently not possible. There it is again – the oyster. Alex Veit
The heads of the political groups in the EU Parliament did not completely clear the way for the committee reform yesterday. They actually wanted to turn the previous subcommittees Security and Defense (SEDE) and Public Health (SANT) into full committees. In addition, there are to be two special committees limited to twelve months: for combating the housing shortage (Housing) and for strengthening democracy (Democracy Shield). However, there were still complications at last night’s Conference of Presidents. The aim now is to obtain approval by written procedure by Monday in order to vote in plenary during the week in Strasbourg.
Parliamentarians had already decided to upgrade the former AFET subcommittee SEDE to a full committee in the summer when the party families of the Von der Leyen coalition negotiated the personnel package for the top jobs. The competencies are reflected in the mandates. It is clear that SEDE will not only receive competencies from AFET but also from the ITRE industry committee.
This is to ensure that Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius, whose main area of responsibility is the defense industry, meets a suitable committee in Parliament – in the form of the SEDE full committee under the leadership of Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP). High Representative Kaja Kallas, Mediterranean Commissioner Dubravka Suica, and Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos will then appear in the AFET, under the leadership of David McAllister (CDU).
We need to make a correction to our Editorial from yesterday’s edition on the visit of Minister Robert Habeck to Brussels: There, Habeck spoke of the “contradiction” between the debt rules and the goal of higher defense spending. Since the Draghi report, it has been clear that additional investments in the three-digit billion range are necessary. He then went on to say that the EU debt rules might have turned out differently if this knowledge had been available beforehand. This indirect quote comes from Habeck and not from Federal Finance Minister Jörg Kukies, as we had mistakenly written. We apologize for this oversight.
Get the day off to a good start!
Without more efficient use of industrial process heat, the European climate targets can hardly be achieved. This is because the main source of emissions in the industrial sector is the combustion of fossil fuels – primarily gas – to generate heat in production processes for food, paper, chemicals, steel and cement. According to a report published this Thursday by the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP) think tank, significant greenhouse gas emissions could be avoided by electrifying industrial processes.
It shows that only three percent of process heat was electrified in 2020 – with the remainder being generated using fossil fuels. The RAP experts write that up to 60 percent could already be electrified using commercially available technologies today. By 2035, the potential is even 90 percent. Barriers to faster electrification are:
RAP therefore proposes an EU electrification directive for industry to achieve 60 percent electrification by 2050. The European Commission must improve the economic framework conditions, for example through energy and carbon pricing, tax incentives and targeted support to reduce the investment risk, they say.
Moreover, better grid planning and more research and development funding are needed. “In order to leverage the electrification potential in the German industry, it is important to reform the grid fees and foster more flexibility,” says Jan Rosenow, RAP Director and scientist at the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. Until now, major industrial electricity consumers have received discounts for constant demand. “However, with the advent of variable renewable energy sources, we should move to dynamic, time-varying grid charges that reflect the true cost of transmitting electricity and encourage flexible energy use.”
The industrial sector is responsible for up to 20 percent of global carbon emissions. In Europe, over 65 percent of energy is consumed in industrial applications for processes such as drying, bleaching, sterilization and distillation. And a large proportion of this valuable heat is lost by being released unused into the environment. The company Susheat now aims to change this.
One way to use industrial waste heat more efficiently and thus reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to use high-temperature heat pumps. A new research project by Susheat aims to bring about such an efficiency revolution in the energy consumption of the European industry and drive decarbonization in this sector. Susheat’s developers plan to recover and reuse 75 percent or more of the heat from industries such as food and beverage, paper and petrochemicals.
A recently published study estimates that heat pumps delivering temperatures of up to 250 degrees Celsius could reduce Europe’s industrial emissions by around 20 million tons of CO2 annually and play a “significant” role in achieving the EU’s climate targets. The system consisting of a new type of heat pump with a storage system could also be ready for use in one to two years – provided the political framework conditions and financing costs are right.
Silvia Trevisan and Mateo Sanclemente Lozano are researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. Their university is among the 14 companies and universities involved in Susheat, located in countries such as Romania, Italy, Austria and the UK, Trevisan and Lozano told Table.Briefings. Using a latest-generation Stirling engine, built by the Norwegian company Enerin, they use waste heat and convert it into temperatures of up to 250 degrees.
KTH researchers combine the heat pump with a storage system that partly mimics the shape and function of the human lung. The system has been developed by the Universitat de Lleida (Spain) and can store heat for several hours, providing more flexibility and heat on demand.
In order to be even more flexible and efficient, these new industrial heat pump and heat storage technologies are connected to a solar thermal power plant and an AI management system. The aim is to reuse as much waste heat as possible. In parallel, the technology package is designed for use in different countries with varying electricity prices and conditions.
“You can also achieve temperatures between 200 and 250 degrees with concentrated solar energy,” says Trevisan. In a country like Italy, with abundant sunshine but expensive electricity, you would use more concentrated solar heat and produce less with the heat pump. “In a country like Norway, where the sun shines less but electricity is cheap and environmentally friendly, you can use the industrial heat pump more.”
Commercial industrial high-temperature heat pumps capable of reaching 250 degrees could be available in one to two years. “The integrated system will take longer because the management is more complex – perhaps four to five years,” says Trevisan.
Perhaps the biggest challenges are the capital costs for the new technologies and the government’s incentives. “The technology could be a game changer,” says Trevisan. “Much of the challenge is probably more related to the capital costs and the amortization periods that the industry is willing to accept.”
The European Heat Pump Association shares this view. Most EU countries, as well as Norway, Switzerland and the UK, offer government incentives, but there are also obstacles – including a lack of awareness of the potential of the new technology. For this reason, the association calls on the EU Commission to place these new technologies at the heart of its Industrial Decarbonization Accelerator Act, which is due to be published soon.
Despite new liquefaction capacities for LNG, the industry expects supply to remain tight. “The market will remain tight for the next two to three years,” said Laurent David, spokesman for the International Association of LNG Importers (GIIGNL), at the World LNG Summit in Berlin on Wednesday.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects global liquefaction capacities to grow by six percent by the end of 2025. However, the participants in Berlin made it clear that they also expect global demand to increase for several reasons.
Data centers & AI: In Malaysia and other Southeast Asian countries, data centers are driving up electricity consumption, and this needs to be covered by either renewables or gas, said Alan Heng, CEO of Pavilion Energy from Singapore. In any case, the gas industry sees itself as a competitor to nuclear power. The latter is favored by many Silicon Valley companies. Andrew Elliot from ExxonMobil is convinced that carbon capture is the only competitive and available technology to supply low-carbon electricity for data centers at all times.
Supplement to renewables & nuclear: “We still need a centralized backup and that brings you to LNG. Batteries and hydrogen is not enough,” said Javier Moret, Global Head of LNG at RWE. The Essen-based company is also using similar arguments to promote a centralized capacity market in Germany. However, nuclear power plants are also dependent on peak load from gas, said Takeuchi Atsunori from Tokyo Gas. In Taiwan, on the other hand, the last remaining nuclear power plant will be decommissioned in 2025, meaning that more gas will be needed, said Jane Liao from energy company CPC.
Shipping: In Singapore, the use of LNG in shipping has grown exponentially this year, reported Heng from Pavilion Energy. With affordable prices, this development is set to continue.
China and other countries are in the process of increasing their regasification capacities, summarized Anatol Feygin from the Texan exporter Cheniere. “We will earn our money in tight times,” said Feygin. Conference President Pat Roberts emphasized the role that terminals and pipelines play once they have been built: “From my experience over the last 20 years, I can say that once the infrastructure is in place, there will be opportunities to use it.”
It is true that many participants committed to decarbonization. However, concrete announcements were almost completely absent. Nnamdi Anowi from Nigeria LNG reported on a study on the financial viability of CCS. Only one to two dozen participants attended the first “World Renewable Fuels Conference” – a fraction of those in the main conference hall. Not a single NGO representative took part in a panel on decarbonization.
The European methane regulation is set to be an important first step towards decarbonization. Over the next few years, it will ban the venting and flaring of natural gas from extraction in the EU, combat methane leaks and at least oblige importers to report on emissions. The latter is not a mission impossible, emphasized Georges Tijbosch from the MiQ certification initiative.
So far, however, it has mainly been large gas companies that have been concerned with the greenhouse gas footprint of their production. “Many suppliers have no idea where their molecules come from,” said Feygin from Cheniere. From the European regulation, Tijbosch from MiQ expects a permissible leakage rate of 0.2 percent from production alone in the future: “Many companies that we certify are below this. However, the average in the USA is much higher.”
Venting and flaring were widely used for a long time in the Permian Basin in Texas, for example, where natural gas is partly a by-product of oil production. Small producers found the cost of gas pipelines too high, so they simply flared the gas.
Under Donald Trump, the US is expected to roll back regulation. “It’s clear that the new administration wants to eliminate methane,” said Christopher Goncalves from the Berkeley Research Group on a panel. The withdrawal of methane regulation will come quickly because the government will not have to go through the US Congress.
However, Goncalves also sees two opposing movements. In Democrat-ruled California and other blue states, it will be difficult for Trump to change policy. In addition, many gas pipelines are now under construction in the Permian Basin. “Companies will now want to export more LNG, and perhaps the most important way to prevent gas wastage is to bring it to market.”
His critics have already given Daniel Křetínskýs (49) many labels: The “Czech Sphinx,” he was called by the Financial Times. The French journalist Jérôme Lefilliâtre called him the “garbage collector of Europe” in a biography. This is because Křetínský acquired Mitteldeutsche Braunkohlengesellschaft (Mibrag) in 2009 and Leag in Lusatia in 2016. By purchasing the coal companies, the billionaire became one of the biggest air polluters in Europe.
Now there is another characterizing metaphor: “Buttoned up like an oyster” is how he describes his concrete plans for the Thyssenkrupp steel subsidiary TKSE, said Jürgen Kerner in an interview with Table.Briefings. However, the second chairman of IG Metall and member of the Supervisory Board of Thyssenkrupp AG has a very differentiated impression of Křetínský.
Daniel Křetínský already holds a fifth of the shares in TKSE, with an option for a further 30 percent. “When I send him a message, he responds immediately,” says Kerner. “That’s very polite.” But there is still no discussion about the important issues.
Without a binding discussion, it remains unclear whether Křetínský wants to invest his own money in the Group in order to enable the restructuring and ecological transformation of Germany’s largest steel group, which is in deficit. “Every week that goes by without such a conversation feeds doubt in me and my colleagues that he is the right owner,” warns Kerner. Yet the Czech is actually “a very approachable person” with whom it is easy to talk “about many different topics on a meta-level.”
Sigmar Gabriel describes the investor in a very similar way in an interview with Table.Briefings: “I got to know Mr. Křetínský as an extraordinarily knowledgeable and very good analyst,” says the former Federal Minister of Economic Affairs, who resigned from his position as Chairman of the TKSE Supervisory Board in late summer in a dispute with the ThyssenKrupp Executive Board. At the time, Gabriel even recommended that Křetínský should take over TKSE completely – a statement that the former Minister did not want to repeat.
According to the Forbes Rich List, Křetínský is one of the three richest Czechs with 9.4 billion US dollars, and his company holdings are estimated to be five times that amount. As the son of a computer science professor and a constitutional judge, there are several fortunate circumstances that explain how he came to this wealth: firstly, after studying law and gaining his doctorate at Masaryk University in Brno, he met Patrik Tkác and Petr Kellner.
Tkác, a successful banker from Slovakia, brought Křetínský into his investment company J&T in 1999 and made him a partner in 2003. Together they founded the holding company EPH in 2009 and initially became involved in the fossil energy business in Central Eastern Europe. Kellner, for his part, had bought up apparently worthless shares in the former state-owned companies with his Dutch-registered fund PPF during the so-called coupon privatization after the fall of communism in the Czech Republic and made a fortune in the process. Křetínský was in a relationship with Kellner’s daughter Anna for many years, and with her father’s help, he built up the convoluted EPH company empire.
It also benefited enormously from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since then, not only have the coal-fired power plants in eastern Germany and elsewhere been profitable, but according to the Czech NGO Re-Set, the profits from the transit of natural gas from Siberia to Western Europe, which EPH’s majority shareholding in Eustream collects, have also increased. The Ukrainian government was just as unenthusiastic about this as it was about the continuing business of the Düsseldorf-based retail group Metro in Russia. Křetínský had bought into the struggling Metro in 2018.
Today, Daniel Křetínský owns a complex network of companies throughout Europe. He holds stakes in supermarket chains such as Sainsbury (UK) and Casino (France), soccer clubs such as Westham United and Sparta Prague, and the Dutch postal service. In France, he bought the left-wing magazine Marianne and the second-largest publishing house Editis in addition to the magazine Elle. In his home country, his Czech News Center has a third of the media market, including the tabloid Blesk.
According to Křetínský’s numerous opponents from the environmentalist scene, this paper in particular has repeatedly denied climate change – supposedly fitting for an investor who has made a large part of his fortune from fossil fuels. One prominent opponent is EU Commissioner Jozef Síkela. During his time as Czech Minister of Industry and Trade, he fended off Křetínský’s takeover attempt of pipeline operator Net4Gas and nationalized the company. Síkela felt unfairly pressured by negative reporting in Blesk. Křetínský now presents himself as a climate protector and claims to want to promote the energy transition with his companies.
Daniel Křetínský’s business strategy is to buy up companies in crisis at low prices. He then usually holds them for years. Unlike many other investors, he does not usually break them up into individual parts. But he also often does not invest on a large scale in order to get the companies back on the road to success. However, Kerner, an IG Metall employee, is still hoping for this for TKSE.
However, Křetínský’s spokesman Daniel Častvaj denied that Křetínský is withdrawing profits, as a Greenpeace report on Leag recently suggested. “As shareholders, we have not yet received a single euro of profit as a dividend,” Častvaj wrote to Table.Briefings. “All profits are reinvested in the company.” Otherwise, he asked for understanding that an interview with Křetínský on Leag or TKSE is currently not possible. There it is again – the oyster. Alex Veit
