CATEGORY:EXTRADITION
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By Wallace J.A (Inside Grenada correspondent)


SEPTEMBER 30, 2006 – Czech financier, Victor Kozeny, alias ‘the Pirate of Prague’, will soon be extradited (from the Bahamas) to the United States where he faces a long list of corruption charges. The US Department of Justice has been working hard for over three years to make his extradition a reality. The ruling to hand over Kozeny to the US was made in a Bahamian court on Thursday.

Victor Kozeny was born in the former Soviet Bloc country of Czechoslovakia. He is suspected of making enormous sums of money out of the Czech Republic’s privatization program in the 1990’s. At one time, he was considered the Czech Republic’s richest man. He became the subject of a major investigation around 1988.

Around 2001, the Czech police, after their investigations, brought fraud charges against Kozeny, who was by then an Irish citizen. Kozeny and his associates were accused of defrauding about 300,000 shareholders out of around $310 million. Kozeny received Irish citizenship in 1995 by investing around €1.27 million in a software company under the then government's "passports for investment scheme."

For a brief period, Kozeny also had in his possession a Grenadian passport, which he acquired under the Government of Grenada’s now-defunct “economic citizenship program.” The Grenadian authorities came up with the idea of ‘selling’ citizenship to prominent business people at US$40,000, in a bid to rake-in funds and give investments a boost.

Later on, after the collapse of First International Bank of Grenada (an offshore bank run by another international fraudster, Gilbert Allen Ziegler also known as Van Arthur Brink, who fleeced unsuspecting investors from around the globe of close to $300 M before going to live in Uganda where there is no extradition), the Grenadian authorities revoked a number of passports, including that of Victor Kozeny.

Kozeny has been residing in the Bahamas since the 1990’s and has a home in Lyford Cay, one of Nassau's elite residential areas. In October 2005, Bahamian police arrested him after he was indicted in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan on 27 counts of bribing top Azerbaijan officials.

He is charged with defrauding clients of the New York-based Omega Advisors Inc. of around $182 million during his dealings with an Azerbaijan oil company in 1998. If convicted, he could face up to 25 years in prison.