Coal tender

First, he engineered the biggest-ever leveraged buyout in the Czech Republic. Now Zden�ek Bakala is readying the country's biggest IPO.

Bakala, 46, a Credit Suisse First Boston veteran and the founder of leading Czech investment bank Patria Finance, hopes to raise some E1 billion ($1.3 billion) by listing about one third of the country's leading coal-mining group, OKD, on the London and Prague stock exchanges in the second half of this year. Bakala bought OKD in November 2004 for E400 million from its former management team. Analysts estimate OKD is worth E3 billion today thanks to sharply rising coal prices. "Even two years ago we could see that soaring demand for steel in Eastern Europe and elsewhere would lead to much higher coal values," says Bakala.

Few would question Bakala's instincts -- or his drive. Born in then-Czechoslovakia's Moravian rust belt, he fled to the U.S. at 19 and learned English while working as a dishwasher at a Lake Tahoe casino. He went on to earn an MBA from Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business before returning home in 1990 to head CSFB's Prague office. He launched Patria in 1994 and sold it to Belgian bank group KBC in late 2000 for E56 million.

Bakala left Patria a little over a year later and began making private equity investments in real estate and energy. After purchasing OKD he merged it with two smaller mines and sold off eight unrelated businesses. OKD's 2006 sales and profits won't be reported until April, but analysts are expecting double-digit increases over 2005, when revenues rose 7.4 percent, to 58 billion Czech koruna ($2.6 billion).

Now living in Prague with local celebrity Michaela Malá�cová -- Miss Czechoslovakia 1991 and the pageant's current organizer -- Bakala wants to use proceeds from the IPO to purchase coal operations slated for privatization in Poland and Ukraine. His goal: "To be a leading consolidator of the Eastern European coal industry."