Background
Born in Česká Lípa, north Bohemia, in 1964.
Kellner is a media-shy tycoon who runs the PPF Group’s strategic development operations, was chairman of the board of directors 1998–2007 and currently owns 98.94 percent of PPF Group N.V., the holding company of the PPF Group, according to the firm’s website. The firm has been headquartered in Amsterdam since 1995.
In 1989, as a 25-year-old recent graduate from VŠE, he briefly worked at the Barrandov Studios as a producer and even tried his hand at acting with a small role in Irena Pavlásková’s Time of the Servants (Čas sluhů), thus providing the country with one of the very few video recordings in which he can be seen. Going by the video, it seems it was a good idea to turn his attention to business rather than mass entertainment.
PPF struck a consequential coup in the mid-1990s when it acquired a 20 percent stake in the Czech insurance company Česká pojišťovna (ČP). “The PPF Group was a strategic corporate investor [in ČP] that brought the company up from loss to long-term profitability,” PPF Group spokesman Radek Stavěl told The Prague Post via e-mail.
One of PPF’s most profitable endeavors has been Home Credit. The firm offers loans and provides financial services in particular to lower-middle-income individuals who may struggle to get such financial help from bigger institutions.
Home Credit operates in 10 countries, from the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Belarus eastward to Russia, Kazakhstan, China, and is very active in Vietnam, as well as India and Indonesia. It also launched operations in the Philippines in October 2013.
The Home Credit B.V. consumer finance holding company is based in the Netherlands and has its management headquarters (Home Credit International a.s.m.) in Prague, and the PPF Group currently has an 86.6 percent share in it, according to Stavěl.
Together with his wife, Renáta, Kellner also runs The Kellner Family Foundation charity, which is focused on education and provides grants to students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
He has acquired a great deal of the late Czech photographer Josef Sudek’s works and even restored his original studio in Malá Strana, which reopened in 2000 as a photo gallery.
Kellner’s primary residence is his villa in the tiny town of Podkozí to the west of Prague, where he owns an enormous property on some 30 hectares of land. He has another house in Vrané nad Vltavou, just south of Prague’s city center, that was designed by architect Josef Pleskot and built in 1995, and many more apartments and mansions around the world, including in Barbados and the Alps.
According to news reports last year, Kellner also helped former President Václav Klaus acquire space for the institute that takes his name in the Hanspaulka mansion in Dejvice. The Václav Klaus Institute has been housed in this house belonging to millionaire and former officer in the State Security (StB), Jaroslav Čadek, since 2013.
One of the most visible actions taken by the PPF group involves the redevelopment of Hotel Praha, the former luxury hotel from the communist era that Kellner acquired through his company in 2013. Since March 2014, the hotel has slowly undergone demolition, and the site will eventually be used for the Open Gate school project that is one of the major initiatives of The Kellner Family Foundation.