Jiří Šmejc is one of those rich people who avoid the public eye. The 50-year-old Czech also doesn’t enjoy collecting football clubs like Prague billionaire and Metro major shareholder Daniel Křetínský (Sparta Prague, West Ham United) or pursuing political ambitions like agricultural holding owner Andrej Babiš as prime minister of the Czech Republic Republic lived out. Escapades like those of the real estate mogul Radovan Vítek, who recently became the owner of the Austrian Immofinanz, who sometimes shuts down the ski lifts in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, because the municipality owes him money, are as foreign to Šmejc as frenzy at 417 kilometers per hour on German autobahns, which the Czech multi-millionaire Radim Passer himself documented on the Internet with his 1500 hp Bugatti at the beginning of the year.
But despite all the seclusion, Šmejc, who in 2021 was ranked 12th in the Forbes list of the richest Czechs with the equivalent of 840 million euros, apparently one thing is important: that he earned his money himself. According to his confident CV on the homepage of his Emma group of companies: “He started from scratch – with no capital, no assets acquired in the Czech coupon privatization.”
