Bankrupt Čezeta owes around 20 million

Claims worth 23 million crowns have been filed by creditors in the bankruptcy of Čezeta Motors, a Prostějov-based company which manufactured electric scooters and has been in insolvency proceedings since February 2021 due to millions of debts. The value of the company’s property amounts to less than 100 thousand crowns, as can be seen from the insolvency register. The court declared bankruptcy last July, shortly after the second of its two executives, Daniel Gašpar, joined the insolvency proposal for the Čezeta Motors company. He had previously tried to find investors for the over-indebted company.

The insolvency administrator, Mr. Michael Šefčík, supported claims worth five million crowns. The inventory of Čezeta Motors shows that its movable property is worth almost 49 thousand crowns and the bankrupt company had another 51 thousand crowns in its accounts. “The satisfaction of creditors can probably be expected in lower units of percentages,” pointed out the insolvency administrator of Čezeta Motors, Michael Šefčík.

It will probably be possible to obtain additional money from the possible sale of Čezeta trademarks, whose total accounting value was estimated by the insolvency administrator at 3.5 million crowns. Čezeta Motors does not own real estate, in Prostějov it assembled electric scooters in rented premises. “The company is not actually operated, so it cannot be used in any way,” the administrator pointed out.

The company Čezeta Motors, whose managing director and majority owner is Neil Eamonn Smith, filed for bankruptcy in February last year. Smith proposed to the court a declaration of bankruptcy for the assets of Čezeta Motors. But Gašpar, together with two creditors, argued for a long time that insolvency proceedings were not necessary, since one of the creditors managed to get 6.5 million crowns from investors for this project. A condition for the transfer of money was an agreement with Smith. But in the end, this plan failed and the court declared bankruptcy.

In February 2021, Smith justified the filing of an insolvency petition for Čezeta Motors by the fact that the company was unable to find a buyer and the owners were not willing to deposit sufficient cash to continue operations. The company became insolvent and stopped production. In the years 2018 and 2019, it reported a combined profit of over 21 million crowns. Čezeta Motors owes around 20 million crowns.

About ten years ago, Čezeta Motors came up with a prototype of an electric scooter, which was based on the famous “pig” produced by the ČZ factory in the 1950s and 1960s. Between 2018 and 2020, it produced the first series of 60 type 506 scooters, which it exported to ten countries in Europe. In 2018, Crowdberry raised 20 million crowns for the company to start serial production. Tens of employees assembled the electric motorcycles at the Wikov site in Prostějov. Expansion plans called for up to 50 employees and production of 2,000 machines per year.