Born to a Jewish family,[3] Železný made headlines in 1968, at the age of 23, when he broadcast in defiance of orders pictures of Russian tanks driving through Prague during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.

[1] In 1993 he applied with five others for a license to broadcast a private television channel to show classical music, cultural programmes and current affairs.

In February 1994 he launched TV NOVA which became the most popular network, although it was criticised as undermining the cultural tradition of Czechs.

While the London tribunal dismissed the claim by Lauder, the Stockholm tribunal, effectively dealing with the same issue, found the Czech Republic liable for not protecting the CME's investment in the Czech Republic and awarded CME damages of $270 million, which were eventually paid from taxpayers' money.

In 2008 he told Prague Radio he was a "fierce eurosceptic" and said the European Union was "an over-regulated environment which strongly resembles what we know from our communist past" In 2009 he launched Libertas.cz.

of selling property and making a speculative agreement with a Liechtenstein company to avoid paying his debt to CME.