The Czech Republic has beaten Poland to attract Nexen Tire Corp. to invest 829 million euros ($1.1 billion) in its first plant in the European Union as the South Korean company expands outside Asia.

“To win this new major investment, the Czech side has had to fight until the last moment against a competing Polish offer,” Czech Industry Ministry Jan Mladek told The Wall Street Journal late Monday. “Therefore we have chosen a mix of several incentives such as subsidies for creating new jobs, subsidies for strategic investments, tax breaks and a partial compensation for the local (Czech) administration to buy [an] additional building plot [to be used by Nexen].”

The beauty contest of investment aid to attract Nexen reflects greater competition among ex-communist countries in the EU’s east, who are competing to lure large, labor-intensive manufacturing investors and create jobs.

Before picking its Czech site near the city of Zatec, 90 kilometers west of Prague, the South Korean company also considered building its plant in the Polish town of Ujazd, 300 kilometers south-east of Warsaw near the Czech border. Read More »

Slovak and Czech governments Wednesday urged Ukraine’s leaders to hold talks with the country’s opposition to prevent any further escalation of violence in the ex-Soviet state.

“The only way out of the current situation are political talks between the government on the one side and the opposition and representatives of civic societies on the other about necessary constitutional reforms, democratic and transparent presidential elections,” Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico said.

Slovakia shares a 110-kilometer-long border with Ukraine. Read More »

Slovakia’s foreign minister said Friday that two Slovak soldiers and one from the U.S. were killed during a suicide bomber attack on the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

“First of all we would like to express our deep condolences to the bereaved families,” Miroslav Lajcak said. “We are strongly deploring any attack against Slovak soldiers and coalition forces in Afghanistan.”

Neither the Slovak minister nor ISAF officials have identified the three killed servicemen.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said the rebel group was behind the attack, which took place in an eastern district of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, near a local base of North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces. Read More »

Slovakia donated money to fellow European Union state Bulgaria to help the bloc’s poorest nation deal with the influx of refugees fleeing war-ravaged Syria.

Slovak President Ivan Gasparovic, on an official visit to Sofia, Tuesday donated 100,000 euros ($135,000) to the country’s Red Cross, following 30,000 euros given last month.

Since January, the influx of refugees to Bulgaria, which borders Turkey, has risen seven-fold to over 7,000 and it is expected to peak at 11,000 by the year-end. Bulgaria serves as an EU point of entry for the refugees wishing to settle in other more affluent countries in the EU’s north and west.

Bulgaria struggles with a shortage of temporary shelter and other basic necessities such as medical assistance and food for the immigrants. Read More »

GODOLLO, Hungary–Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary–which make up the group of countries known as the Visegrad4–said Thursday they strongly support including western Balkan countries in the European Union to ensure stability in a region that is often torn apart by war and ethnic conflict.

“Some may say the train [of EU enlargement] is moving too fast or some may say it’s moving too slow but the main thing for the V4 is that the train is moving,” said Hungarian foreign minister Janos Martonyi, who hosted the event.

The V4 said EU enlargement is able to stabilize and transform the region for the benefit of all its partners while cautioning that membership should be conditional on the individual performance of those wishing to join.

Thursday’s meeting, which was also attended by high-level government representatives from Italy, Turkey, and Austria, was mainly intended to lend support to the Western Balkan countries of Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina in their efforts to accede to the EU, and to discuss further cooperation among some of the countries present in energy, infrastructure and culture.

Croatia became the EU’s most recent new member when it joined on July 1, taking the total to 28.

EU enlargement “is far from being on an autopilot. Brussels needs to seriously take into consideration concerns of the citizens of the EU,” said Stefan Fule, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, who was also present at the meeting the. Read More »

Mixed economic data from a cluster of four neighboring Central European countries has added weight to mounting claims by politicians that austerity isn’t the best way for Europe to climb out of its current crisis.

Hungary alone surprised on the upside, with a better-than-expected return to growth in the first three months of the year. It was also the only one of the four to be shoving public money into infrastructure projects instead of cutting back.

Over the same period, the Czech Republic continued battling its longest recession since 1989, while Poland and Slovakia still grew but more slowly than in previous quarters.

“In our view, the main reason behind [gross domestic product] divergence in the first quarter across Central Europe could have been government investment,” said BNP Paribas economist Michal Dybula, adding that the Hungarian government had given itself room to increase spending by bringing its deficit down to 2% of GDP last year.

He said the euro zone is a key export market for the European Union’s eastern flank and largely influences their economic fortunes.

Slowing exports, declining domestic consumer demand and government spending remain at the root of Czech economic problems while infrastructure spending and improving tourist revenue are driving Hungary’s recovery.

Slovakia’s economy was lifted by its car makers and their still popular low-end and high-end models. Read More »

Workers at the Slovak unit of Volkswagen AG welcomed Bentley Motors’ tentative plan to produce its first all-wheel drive model at their plant near the Slovak capital of Bratislava.

They are skilled enough and ready to meet all challenges to host the production of the sport-utility vehicle, Zoroslav Smolinsky, the head of unions at Volkswagen Slovakia said Wednesday.

“We are aware that Bratislava is a candidate for becoming the production site for this Bentley model and our workers would do their best if given a chance,” Mr. Smolinsky told The Wall Street Journal in a telephone interview.

Earlier this week. Wolfgang Schreiber, the chief executive of Bentley Motors, which is owned by the German auto maker, said that the iconic British maker of luxury cars may consider moving the production of its first all-wheel drive model to the Volkswagen plant in Devinska Nova Ves, a town west of Bratislava. Currently Bentleys are exclusively made at the car maker’s Crewe workshops in northwest England. Read More »

The New Year celebrations will remind Czechs and Slovaks of the end of their former federation—Czechoslovakia—which ceased to exist 20  years ago.

Despite the velvet divorce, as the peaceful break-up of the then 15-million country into its western Czech and eastern Slovak parts became known, both nations remain close thanks to similar languages, family links and interconnected economies.

However, differences remain and at least one item has reversed from where it was in the early 1990s: Slovaks are more pro-European than their Czech brethren who have become the most outspoken euro-skeptics in Central Europe.

Some Czech media say that the country’s attitude to the European Union has made Czechs to be the most British-like Continental Europeans.

Both successors of Czechoslovakia are EU members but Slovakia, with a population of five million, is also a euro zone member and more entrenched in European structures than the Czech Republic which has its own currency.

[Read more over the jump] Read More »

With low interest rates making new debt sales attractive, governments in Central and Eastern Europe are busy raising cash for next year, with investors looking favorably at their sovereign bonds.

Slovenia, Romania, and Bulgaria all saw strong demand for their papers in the international bond market over the last month as investors were happy to increase their exposure outside the center of the euro zone’s debt crisis.

Slovakia followed with a debt sale Wednesday, the same day Serbia embarked on a series of meetings with investors for a potential dollar-denominated deal. Poland sold more than planned in its zloty-denominated 2018 bonds on Thursday, funding its 2013 borrowing needs.

Slovakia sold bonds at well below the borrowing costs of stressed fellow euro-zone members Spain and Italy. Slovakia, a euro-zone country that has so far escaped the fiscal problems plaguing its western peers, borrowed 1.25 billion euro ($1.6 billion) worth of 10-year bonds for a yield of 3.421%.

Italy’s 10-year bonds yield around 5%, and Spain’s 5.8%, according to Tradeweb data.

“Cash is cheap, the future is uncertain at this point, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see anyone coming to market,” said Tim Ash, analyst with Standard Bank. Read More »

Slovak Telekom AS, a unit of Deutsche Telekom AG and owner of one of Slovakia’s two leading cellular operators, Thursday said it has scrapped plans to allow its clients to pre-order the iPhone 5 before the high-profile smartphone by Apple Inc. goes on sale in the country on Friday.

“In the end, we’ve decided against taking pre-orders because of low delivery volumes from the supplier,” Slovak Telekom spokesman Michal Korec said. “We’ll begin selling iPhone 5 tomorrow morning during regular opening hours of our stores.”

Slovak Telekom operates its cellular network under Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile brand.

Mr. Korec didn’t elaborate on the total number of iPhone 5 models that will be available during the launch at its T-Mobile outlets and how short that amount might be of estimated demand for the smartphone. Read More »