“The privatization of Fatra took a turn that we absolutely did not want nor plan. We chose the strategy to buy all Fatra employees coupon voucher books. We expected that Fatra will be an employee owned company with a shareholder model. Viktor Kožený came on the scene and leveled Fatra like a castle made of sand. Even though we acquired all the ‘points’ it was not enough for the privatization and Kožený’s investment fund bought the company in the first round. The interest in Fatra drove its stock sky high. My co-workers cashed in 125,000 Korunas per voucher book. Employees came into my office with bouquets of flowers. Married couples that were employees made a quarter million, which was a lot of money at the beginning of the 1990s. I never sold my voucher book. What kind of a director would I be if I sold shares in the company that I run? In the end I received 1,400 Korunas for my share. Privatization of Fatra was not financially rewarding in my case. To put it simply: during my fifteen years as director, Fatra had five different owners.”
“Political vetting began in 1970 and we got expelled from the party. In Fatra, this process had an interesting course of events. The colleagues who did not have university education and were considered to be disloyal were demoted from technical job positions to manual labor. Those of us who had university education were punished by a steep cut in wages. The former company director Mika probably saved us from manual labor when he said that we owed a debt (for our education) to the working class.”
“The Civic Forum chapter at Fatra in Napajedla was started by the technical department. An interesting point was that I nearly ended up like Lenin during the Great October Socialist Revolution because I spoke from atop of an agricultural tractor trailer. Students arrived at the Fatra plant and told us what’s coming. So a hard-line communist, and a scoundrel, climbed on top of the trailer and started to organize the revolution at Fatra. This made me really mad. So I also climbed on top of the trailer and said: ‘Wake up people, are you going to do this with someone who fed you the party line for the past twenty years.’ Huge applause followed. My career picked up after this point and I was promoted to technical director in 1990.”
Jaroslav Toufar was born in the village of Hvozdná near Zlín on March 19, 1941. He grew up in the town of Napajedla in company housing built by the Bata industrial concern for its Fatra plant that manufactured rubber and plastic components. Mr Toufar’s mother worked on the production line while his father worked up to a supervisory position. After a technical trade school, Jaroslav Toufar enrolled in the Faculty of Chemical Technology, Pardubice University. After graduation he worked in Fatra in the research and development department. He joined the communist party in hopes of reforming it. After the Warsaw Pact invasion in August of 1968 he joined the protests against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was expelled from the communist party in 1970 after political vetting. In 1989 Jaroslav Toufar partook in the demonstrations against the communist regime in Prague. He was active in the transition to democracy at Fatra, where he became company director from 1990 to 2005. He lived in Napajedla. Jaroslav Toufar died on July 27th, 2023.
