LONDON.- Design Museum announced that Zdeněk Bakala, Czech-born businessman, investor and philanthropist, has joined its Board of Trustees.

Zdeněk Bakala, 52, is active in industries from mining to energy and media. He is the owner of Czech publishing house Economia and has seen a wide group of businesses flourish across several continents. He co-founded BXR, a diversified investment group with a global portfolio of assets.

With a lifelong passion for design, and interests in cultural and intellectual development and human rights, he founded in 2007 the Zdeněk Bakala Foundation, which provides scholarships at prestigious universities around the world to talented Czech students. He also supports the Václav Havel Library, a centre for the documentation and research of modern Czech history, with an emphasis on promoting the ideas and works of former Czech president Václav Havel.

He is a partner of DOX – the Centre for Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design, Prague – and he initiated the opening of the CEE affiliate of the Aspen Institute, an educational and policy studies non-profit organisation. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.

He started his business career in 1989 at Drexel Burnham Lambert investment bank in New York, and then moved to Bank of America. In 1994, Bakala founded Patria Finance, the Czech Republic’s very first private investment banking group. In 2004, he was one of the founders of the group Bakala Crossroads – BXR (formerly RPG). In the same year, this group acquired OKD – a major Czech hard coal mining company, now part of New World Resources. He earned his MBA degree at the Tuck School of Business.