The first impulse for the founding of the ECG group was a simple consideration in 1999. Which area of Czech economy offered the greatest potential of a large number of assets changing their owners? The answer was simple: the claims. There were unpaid claims on the market worth more than 400 billion. They were owned by the state or by the banks, which was not a standard situation. Pledges must have their actual owners who would duly manage them and not let them decay. This simple question was asked immediately after most subjects representing the vast majority of GDP gains found their owners after a decade of privatisation processes. In that process of ownership changes we had been active and we decided to remain active in the process of transformation of the unpaid, especially bank loans into liquid assets.

The second step was to build a group able to resolve ownership and legal issues of thousands of business cases, mainly thanks to a sophisticated methodology of legal and economic treatment of the claim assets accompanied with simplification of the complex debtor-creditor relationships following from the claim existence when the debtor was at the same time a client of the creditor bank. Thanks to our system, which was unrivalled in its time, we were able to offer services to financial institutions such as the Agrobanka, the ČSOB financial group, or later the J&T Bank, a.s.

The third and the most decisive step was trading the claims or claim packages at our own expense or at the expense of our clients. We managed to purchase assets in tender proceedings with the nominal value of more than 80 billion for the purchase price of over 4 billion. To give a better idea of the acquisition the assets represented thousands of debtors with more than 8000 pledges entered in the Land Register. The greatest shares in the transferred assets were represented by the ČKA (originally ČS, KB and IPB), the Unionbanka, the Agrobanka, or the Ekoagrobanka. Thanks to the broad coverage the company gathered extensive experience in settlements of many different types of claims.