The Activist

Tomas Fiala grew up fighting the Komsomol during Czechozlovakia’s Velvet Revolution. Now he is the majority owner of Dragon Capital, Ukraine’s most successful investment bank, but he’s still fighting for investors’ rights, writes Benjamin Seeder in Kiev.

It was early 1996, and 24 year-old Tomas Fiala entered his boss’s office with a letter of resignation. The young Czech, who worked as a junior analyst in the Prague office of Eastern European specialist Wood & Co, told his boss he’d received a better offer from another company.