SELF-MADE? SELF-SERVED Forbes says Czech tycoon Vítek built his $7B alone.

The partners who saved Vítek from bankruptcy are back, and they brought a Cyprus judge

09/20/2026 | Frank Parlato

SELF-MADE? SELF-SERVED Forbes says Czech tycoon Vítek built his $7B alone.

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AT A GLANCE

Subject: Radovan Vítek
Forbes net worth: $7 billion
Forbes source of wealth: Real estate, self made
Forbes residence: Crans-Montana
Company: CPI Property Group
Cyprus order: asset freeze of roughly half a billion euros
Former partners' claim: CZK 13 billion, about €535 million
CPI reported first-half loss attributable to shareholders of €77 million

THE MAN ON THE FORBES CARD

Forbes profiles Radovan Vítek among the world's billionaires.

Name, money, rank, mansion. Nice and clean.

Net worth, according to Forbes: $7 billion.

Rank: 584th richest person on earth.

Source of wealth: "Real estate, self made."

Two words do a lot of work there: "self made."

Nothing launders a complicated history quite like two words beneath a billionaire's photograph.

Residence: Crans-Montana, the Swiss ski resort.

Forbes leaves out what happened with the lifts.

Vítek owns the ski lifts. In 2018 he asked the local towns for CHF 800,000 a year to keep running them. Crans-Montana said no. At Easter, in the middle of the holiday, he shut the lifts down.

The town wouldn't pay. The lifts stopped. Everybody discovered who owned the hill.

The tourists were bused to other resorts. Two neighboring communes eventually agreed to pay. Crans-Montana held out.

Forbes also reports that Vítek owns a 260-acre Surrey estate formerly owned by Ringo Starr.

Forbes lists his marital status as married.

Court records in Prague and London document two divorces, including a more recent settlement reported in the billions of Czech crowns.

The courts have a longer version than Forbes.

Vítek is 55, has four children and holds a law degree.

He entered business in Slovakia during the voucher privatizations of the 1990s, when an entire economic system was being dismantled and redistributed with unusual speed. His timing was excellent.

He got there while the country was putting price tags on things that used to belong to everybody.

"Voucher privatization" is one of those phrases that sounds like a supermarket promotion until you discover the product is a country.

Forbes says Vítek has appeared on its billionaires list for 13 years and has ranked as high as No. 390.

The card is clean. The story underneath it isn't.

WHAT THE CARD LEAVES OUT

cpi vitek — CPI's website says it is a family-owned group. It does not say which family. Radovan Vítek's name does not appear on it. It appears in the bond prospectuses, where it is listed under risk factors.

CPI Property Group, the company underlying most of Vítek's reported wealth, reported a first-half loss attributable to shareholders of €77 million, pays close to €1 million a day in interest and operates with limited headroom above one of its bond covenant thresholds. I went through the numbers in Part One and the borrowing in Part Two.

A Cyprus court has imposed an asset-freeze order of roughly half a billion euros while two former business partners pursue claims that he cheated them out of their half of the company. They put in about €400 million. They are suing for CZK 13 billion, about €535 million.

French courts have issued multiple orders requiring demolition of his Provence property. The village of Gordes gave him a permit for a 200-square-meter farmhouse. He built a 1,300-square-meter palace.

And the "self made" part rests, according to Luxembourg's financial regulator, on a hidden stake, a secret partner, a mother, three straw men, and a €12,500 fine.

The official version has more people in it than the Forbes card does.

"Self made" is a wonderful phrase because it leaves out everybody who helped make the self.

There are two attacks on the Forbes number, and they come from different directions.

One side, the Luxembourg regulator, says the fortune started crooked. The other, the short-seller Muddy Waters, says the buildings are marked too high.

Maybe he's worth seven billion. Maybe he's worth less. The point is nobody gets to settle that argument by reading the Forbes card.

I took a run at it here.

If the lawsuit goes against him, the appraisals come down, and the lenders get nervous, all at once, there may not be much left.

Dominoes are static until the first one moves.

CPI shares are held through a trust for his three youngest children. That changes whose name appears on the ownership structure. It does not answer what the shares are ultimately worth.

Put the shares in a trust, put them in his mother's name, put them in a Cyprus company. The label changes. The question underneath it doesn't: what is CPI worth?

KARMA, AND THE ORDER IN WHICH IT ARRIVES

Radovan Vítek is a man in trouble. He has several problems at once.

The people chasing him now are the people who were there at the start. Sometimes the people you meet at the beginning are still there at the end.

His former partners say he kept their half of the company after they put in about €400 million to save it.

American ORCO shareholders later alleged he illegally extracted roughly $1 billion from that company. CPI grew from the assets and transactions that followed.

That's the allegation. Now some of those people are back.

One need not invoke karma. Court papers will do.

As long as everyone gets paid, nobody looks too hard at how the money moved. The day the checks stop, the same transactions get read by different people: bankruptcy trustees, prosecutors. An allegation is still just an allegation. But the audience changes.

René Benko was untouchable until Signa stopped paying. The day it did, Austrian prosecutors found a fraud case that had sat in plain sight for years.

The money crossed borders. So did the investors. American shareholders sued him in Manhattan federal court. An American bank, Goldman Sachs Bank USA, was on the list of banks served with the Cyprus freeze.

That's usually where New York starts getting interested.

vitek partners — Marek Čmejla and Jiří Diviš, are suing for the €320 million they say Vítek took from them, plus their share of what it earned.

BUILT TO RUN

vitek yacht — Vítek's two long-range yachts, built to stay at sea for months at a time. One was paid for with money that came from CPI bondholders.

Meantime, it's only fair to say that Vítek is prepared. He's got two long-distance yachts that can remain at sea for months, outside jurisdictions where he could be extradited. One of them was paid for with bondholders' money.

He has his castle. He's got his properties, and he's got money in the names of his mother, his son, his children's trust, and a chain of Cyprus shells.

No one can prove he built it that way to run. But it is a matter of record that, if he ever had to, it is built for it. And every extra name on an asset is one more lawyer a creditor has to hire.

CPI paid out €149 million in a January share buyback while asking its lenders to wait longer for their money.

The company did not disclose who got the €149 million. The last time it bought back shares, in 2022, 93 percent of them came from Vítek's own company.

The lenders got later dates. The shareholders got cash. They took the new IOU. Maybe they loved it. Maybe they liked the alternative less.

Before the yachts and the rankings and the castles, there were partners.

Now let us turn next to what they did for him, and what he did to them. That will be the subject of our next story.