Andrej Babiš

Andrej Babiš: The Billionaire Who Ran Against the System He Owned

On 9 December 2025 the Czech Republic swore in as prime minister a man who was simultaneously facing a third trial over a €2 million European Union subsidy, whose conglomerate is the country's largest recipient of EU agricultural money, and who owns two of its major newspapers. His party had just taken 80 of 200 seats on 34.5 per cent of the vote. He had been acquitted twice and had both acquittals overturned on appeal. None of it mattered to enough voters, which is the single most important fact about Andrej Babiš.

Bratislava, Paris, Geneva

He was born on 2 September 1954 in Bratislava, then Czechoslovakia. His father was a Slovak diplomat, his mother a Carpathian German, and the boy was schooled in Paris and Geneva before taking a degree in international trade at the University of Economics in Bratislava. He joined the Communist Party in 1980 and worked from 1978 to 1991 for the state foreign-trade combine Chemapol and later Petrimex, posted to Morocco as its representative in 1985.

That posting is where his biography becomes contested. Czechoslovak secret police files record a collaborator under the codename "Bureš" between 1982 and 1985. Babiš has always denied knowingly being an agent and litigated the point for years; in January 2018 the Slovak courts ruled definitively, without further appeal, that he had been an StB agent. He holds dual Czech and Slovak citizenship.

Agrofert

In January 1993 he became managing director of a newly created Petrimex subsidiary called Agrofert and shortly afterwards its sole owner. What he built from it over the next two decades is the real achievement of his life: by 2011 Agrofert's revenue exceeded 117 billion crowns, making it the fourth-largest company in the country, a holding of more than 230 firms spanning agriculture, food processing and chemicals across the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany. Bloomberg put his fortune at $4.04 billion in November 2020; Forbes at $3.5 billion in February 2024.

In 2013 he bought MAFRA, publisher of the newspapers *Mladá fronta DNES* and *Lidové noviny* and operator of Óčko television, and acquired Radio Impuls, then the most-listened-to station in the country. A businessman with a fertiliser empire had become a media proprietor in the year before he entered government.

ANO, and the Ministry

He founded ANO 2011 in 2012 as an explicitly anti-corruption movement, aimed at an electorate exhausted by the established parties. At the 2013 election it came second with 47 seats and entered government; Babiš became finance minister in 2014.

He was, by the numbers, an effective one. He introduced electronic sales registration, VAT control statements and reverse-charge VAT, tightening collection considerably. Critics noted that the compliance burden fell hardest on small and medium businesses while large corporations — Agrofert among them — were comparatively advantaged. He resigned on 24 May 2017 amid allegations over his own tax affairs.

Prime Minister

ANO won the October 2017 election with 29 per cent and 78 seats. Babiš was appointed prime minister on 6 December 2017: the oldest and by far the wealthiest holder of the office, the first from neither ODS nor ČSSD, the first born outside the Czech Republic, the first with dual citizenship, and the first who was not a native Czech speaker. After months without a majority he formed a coalition with the Social Democrats on 27 June 2018, sustained by external Communist Party support and confirmed 105–91 on 12 July. That support lasted until April 2021.

The record was mixed and often turbulent. He expelled three Russian diplomats after the Skripal poisoning in March 2018, and more than eighty in April 2021 after Czech intelligence attributed the 2014 Vrbětice ammunition depot explosions to Russian military intelligence — though a Senate inquiry called his handling uncoordinated and a risk to national security. His government's COVID-19 response was widely judged disorganised and chaotic; roughly 35,000 Czechs died during his term. He lost the 2021 election to Petr Fiala with an approval rating around 30 per cent.

The Cases

Čapí hnízdo — Stork's Nest — is the case that has shadowed everything. Prosecutors allege he obtained a €2 million EU subsidy for a farm and conference centre by transferring ownership to family members so the project would qualify as a small business, after which it returned to Agrofert. The European Anti-Fraud Office concluded in a report dated 27 December 2017 that the fraud had been planned. Prague's municipal court acquitted him on 9 January 2023; the High Court overturned that in September 2023; a retrial acquitted him again on 14 February 2024; the High Court overturned that too on 23 June 2025, ordering a third trial. In January 2026 he declined to consent to his own prosecution, calling the judges politically motivated.

Separately, an EU audit produced twenty-two findings and a recommendation to recover €17.49 million, concluding he had a conflict of interest in allocating EU funds; a 2019 preliminary audit found the conflict persisted even after he placed Agrofert into trust funds in 2017, leaving the group ineligible for EU subsidies. The Pandora Papers in October 2021 revealed an offshore structure used to buy sixteen properties on the French Riviera, including villas at Mougins, for around £18.5 million in 2009, undeclared.

The Comeback

He ran for president in 2023, taking 34.99 per cent in the first round and losing the run-off to Petr Pavel with 41.67 per cent, campaigning on the line "I won't drag Czechia into war. I am a diplomat, not a soldier." Two years later he was back. ANO won October 2025 outright as the largest party, and he formed a government with the hard-right SPD and the Motorists, sworn in on 9 December. He confirmed the Czech ammunition initiative for Ukraine would continue, backed American strikes on Iran in 2026, and in March 2026 faced 250,000 people on Letná Plain protesting what they called the arrogance of power.

Why Andrej Is Called a Genius

The defensible claim is commercial and substantial. Starting from a single subsidiary in January 1993, Babiš assembled a holding of over 230 companies and 117 billion crowns of revenue across three countries within eighteen years, and made himself a dollar billionaire in a post-communist economy where most such fortunes evaporated. The political sequel showed a related talent: he grasped before anyone in Prague that Czech voters' contempt for the established parties was the largest untapped asset in the country, built a vehicle to capture it within months, and has now won three parliamentary elections with it. As finance minister he genuinely improved tax collection. *Foreign Policy* nicknamed him "Babisconi," meant as an insult and serving equally as a description of a rare skill — fusing business, media and party into one operating system.

The counter-case is that this is not genius but conflict of interest at industrial scale. His fortune grew inside a state whose agricultural subsidies he later helped allocate; an EU audit found the conflict unresolved even after the trust arrangement; his anti-corruption movement is led by a man facing a third prosecution for subsidy fraud who owns the newspapers that cover it. His government's pandemic performance was poor, his Russia policy incoherent enough for the Senate to say so, and Politico's Adam Drda has called him "more associated with the decline of Czech democracy than any other individual." Buying the referee is a strategy, not an intellect. What Babiš demonstrably has is nerve, appetite and an accurate read of grievance — and a system too slow to catch him.

Legacy

He remains the most consequential Czech politician of the post-Havel era and the most divisive. He was struck with a cane at a rally in Dobrá on 1 September 2025 and returned to office three months later. Whatever the third Stork's Nest trial produces, he has already changed the shape of Czech politics — and the argument he opened, whether a democracy can be governed by someone who owns a large part of it, is now Europe's as much as Prague's.

Achievements

• Educated at University of Economics in Bratislava
• Worked as businessperson, politician and economist