What can stop Andrej Babiš?

Pavel Pohůnek (61) is happy. "It will attract tourists, and the locals might find jobs there," says the mayor of the central Bohemian municipality of Olbramovice, with some 1,000 residents. "Anyway, having here the seat of the richest man will be an asset for the village."

What Mr. Pohůnek is talking about really has no parallel in the region. The idle distillery Čapí hnízdo on the edge of the village is changing into a generous "congress centre" for managers, equipped with studs for various animals and a vast swimming pond. The project will cost an estimated CZK 100 million and, as the mayor suggested, also attracting attention is the owner of all this, the famous businessman Andrej Babiš (55).

Actually, the dilapidated distillery was not the only thing the new neighbour bought in Olbramovice. What caused a real stir among the locals was the news that the billionaire wants to purchase the local agricultural cooperative operating on thousands of hectares of land.

A good neighbour 
"We did not want to sell, the company did well," the cooperative head Josef Šembera said. "But it was a sort of an offer that one could not refuse." The bid was allegedly breathtaking - the locals, who got their stakes in the cooperative in the early 1990s as a…