Karel Havlíček

Vice-Chairman, Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic (Czech Republic)

He graduated from the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the Czech Technical University, then from the PIBS at Manchester Metropolitan University, and completed his doctoral studies at the Faculty of Business Administration at the University of Economics in Prague, where he also became an associate professor at the Faculty of Finance and Accounting. Since the turn of the millennium he has defended the interests of entrepreneurs, especially as Chairman of the Board of the Association of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises and Tradesmen of the Czech Republic. As co-owner and CEO of the SINDAT Group, he has built the company into a respected investor in the fields of small and medium-sized industry and new technologies over the past twenty years. He has been involved in academia for many years, and in recent years has been associated with the University of Finance and Administration, where he built the Faculty of Economic Studies and where he developed the Economics and Management programme. He has written several academic books on the topic of small and medium-sized enterprises and published dozens of peer-reviewed articles both at home and abroad. He has sat on a number of advisory bodies to the government and ministries, has been a member of the Government Council for Research, Development and Innovation since 2014, and has been its Vice-Chairman since 2018. He is the main author of the government's innovation strategy Czech Republic: the Country For The Future. In April 2019, he was nominated by the Prime Minister to the position of Deputy Prime Minister for Economy and at the same time to the post of Minister of Industry and Trade. On 30 April 2019, he was appointed to both positions by the President of the Republic. On the same date, he resigned from all statutory and ownership positions in the business sector and also left the leadership of the Association of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises and Tradesmen of the Czech Republic. He retired from both ministerial positions on 17 December 2022 and was elected Deputy Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Republic on 18 February 2022.