A U.S. senator has requested that the government review AT&T’s pending sale of its stake in a European media company to a Czech investment firm, because of the Czech company’s links to the Chinese communist regime.
Rubio said in the letter that PPF Group and its chief executive officer, Petr Kellner, “have a record of acting as China’s proxies inside the Czech Republic.”
“This work included spying on Czech politicians, pressuring media to withdraw news articles critical of China, and creating a new think-tank, Sinoskop, to employ biased analysts to influence public debate,” Rubio wrote.
He noted that about a third of PPF’s profits come from its subsidiary Home Credit, an individual lending business in China. According to business publication Ekonom, PPF earned more than 2 billion euros (about $2.2 billion) in China in 2017.
As a result, “Mr. Kellner and his companies have supported China’s malign activities abroad,” Rubio wrote.
“It has come to my attention that PPF has already used its expected acquisition of CME’s Czech media outlets to intimidate Czech media and politicians into silence,” he said.
CME has 30 channels that reach about 45 million viewers across five countries: the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia.
The senator said the United States has an “interest in preserving a free and open media environment overseas as well as preventing the Chinese Communist Party from subverting these platforms in its efforts to undermine democratic norms worldwide.”
The Justice Department and Treasury Department didn’t immediately respond to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.
