Worrying trend

EVERY month, it seems, brings another stain on the Czech Republic's reputation as a financial centre. Last year, eight banks went down thanks to incompetence or fraud. Now investment funds are being tainted. In recent weeks more than 75,000 shareholders in two investment-fund groups, Trend and CS Fondy, have been fleeced of assets worth nearly 2.3 billion koruna ($79m). “If this sort of thing continues,” says Kamil Goca, an analyst at Wood & Co, a Prague broking firm, “the market will close down.”