Industry Min. Jozef Síkela (STAN), an ex-banker who wants an im-portant economics portfolio in the next EU Commission, said sarcas-tically on Czech TV on Oct. 1 of last year (starting at 12:42pm) thathe’s been involved in many transactions over the years but learnedsomething new with the Net4Gas acquisition. The new thing helearned, he said, is that company valuations are done on the basisof the size of the debt. He was defending against headlines in Blesksaying that he paid Kč 5bn for Kč 33bn in debt. Every company hasdebt, he said, and valuations are based on other things. The Fialagovernment’s latest energy-related acquisition, Robin Oil and its 75filling stations by state-owned Čepro, wasn’t handled by STAN fora change, which makes the comments by STAN’s politicians all that more interesting. Jan Farský of STAN, who also has his eye on an EUposition, wrote on X that spending Kč 4.5bn of government moneyfor this doesn’t make sense to him. He didn’t mention the Kč 1.6bn incash at Robin Oil, but then why should he? If Kč 33bn in debt doesn’taffect a company’s value, why should Kč 1.6bn in cash, right?

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