The son of the factory owner, František Otto, imprisoned for ten years by the communist regime, told me that “today everything is based on the 1945 deception and nobody cares whether it was right or not”. The Court of First Instance had already acknowledged that a wrong had been done to the Otto family that could not be atoned for under current law. “The plaintiffs easily got back by agreement two properties, a residential house and land in Rakovník, which were confiscated from them under the same legal norms as Rakona,” the Otto family’s lawyer said.
Otto soap from Rakovník
The Otto of Rakovník Soap Company was founded by the Otto family in 1875. After the end of World War II, accusations followed against the two Ott brothers that they had collaborated with the Nazis. The brothers proved through written testimony that they both supported the anti-German resistance. Nevertheless, on May 15, 1945, three representatives of the works council stormed into the factory owner’s office in overalls and told him that he was forbidden to enter his business from the next day.
In 1993, the descendants of the original owners filed a lawsuit at the District Court (OS) for Prague 1 against the Ministry for the Administration of National Property and its Privatization (MSNJP), which rejected the restitution claims for the Rakona chemical factory in Rakon. In July 1991, it sold it for USD 20 million to the American company Procter & Gamble. The Ott family sought through the courts to have the contract of sale of Rakona Rakovník to the American company declared null and void. The OS dismissed the lawsuit, concluding that the soap factory had been nationalized before 25 February 1948, and thus the Otts were not – according to the court’s statement – beneficiaries within the meaning of the Act on Extrajudicial Rehabilitation. During the trial, the plaintiffs tried to prove that the nationalisation of the factory before 1948 was invalid and that the factory was in fact seized only in April 1948. Their factory had been nationalised on the basis of the Benes Decrees, under which enterprises belonging to the food industry with a workforce of over 150 people were nationalised. However, the applicant party argued that that number of employees did not work for the company at that time and therefore it could not have been nationalised. The son of the owner of Otto’s factory claims that the present dispute is based on fraud. All factories producing artificial edible fats that employed more than 150 people were covered by the Benes Decree. Just before the imposition of the national administration on the Otto factory, the then ‘representatives of the people’ added to the 117 persons working in the food industry those working in the sawmill, the moulding plant and the soda and soap factory, thus proving in their opinion that 204 employees worked in the factory.
They bought the confiscated houses of emigrants for a pittance, now they will be compensated
The former owners of the houses left by the emigrants have the right to compensation. At least that’s what the European Court thinks. The state will have to pay millions of crowns to those who, thanks to their contacts during communism, bought confiscated houses at a bargain price and had to leave them after the fall of the regime. However, they could hardly have bought other housing with the returned money.
Source : https://www.idnes.cz/zabavene-domy-emigrantu-kupovali-za-pakatel-ted-dostanou-odskodneni