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“We have lost a personality and a banker with a huge heart, an outstanding expert who was at the birth of modern domestic banking, and who successfully developed UniCredit Bank and its predecessor Živnostenská banka for more than three decades,” said the current CEO of UniCredit Bank, Jakub Dusílek, when announcing his death Jiří Kunert.
Kunert’s banking career began in 1976 and he retired only two years ago.
After completing his university studies at the University of Economics, he worked for four years in London at the Czech branch of Živnobank. In the period 1986–1988, he was an advisor for banking at the Czechoslovak Federal Ministry of Finance. After the privatization of Živnobanka in 1992, he held the position of Chairman of the Board of Directors and CEO until August 2001.
It later became UniCredit Bank, at whose birth this doyen of the Czech banking scene stood.
Friends and colleagues remember Kunert fondly. “He was a great gentleman, one of the best Czech bankers, but also my close friend. With his work, he gained a good reputation not only in the country, but also abroad,” Pavel Kavánek, the former longtime head of ČSOB, told Seznam Zprávy.
Today, UniCredit Bank is one of the largest domestic banks. It started its activities on the market in November 2007. It was created by the merger of the then Živnostenská banka and the German HVB Bank, which was active in the Czech Republic. The bank currently has approximately 700,000 clients in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
During his life, Kunert was not only involved in banking, he was also involved in the state economic sector. In 1999, he was one of the signatories of the so-called Dřevíč challenge, in which leading Czech economists formulated a series of economic measures to improve the economic situation at the time in the document “How to revive the Czech economy”.
During the government of Mirek Topolánek in 2009, he was also a member of the National Economic Council of the Government (NERV) for a short time. He is also one of the founders of the Czech Banking Association, which brings together more than 99% of the Czech banking sector.
