| Headline: The good banker Svejk Source: Euromoney Date: September 2000 At the Golden Tiger (U Zlateho Tigra) in the back streets of old Prague on a Sunday in midsummer there are no tourists. The schoolroom benches along the back wall resound to the din of Czech voices, leaving no space for the casual visitor to squeeze in. Overworked waiters scurry from beer-counter to customer with neither time nor inclination to explain the goings-on in English. The local Bohemians, swallowing their Pilsner Urquell, pumped ice-cold from the cellar, muse on the operations of the anti-terrorist police who just down the road on the previous Friday – in a Czech version of High Noon – burst into the headquarters of Investicni a Postovni Banka to impose a forced administration. “Why the balaclavas, why the machine guns?” asks a boatman from Podoli, swigging his Pilsner. “They were using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.” “A complete waste of public money,” echoes a tax inspector from Josefov. “Couldn’t they have sent a polite e-mail asking IPB employees to leave the bank quietly and please not press ‘delete’ on their computers?” volunteers a student of international relations at Charles University. |