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Real estate magnate and former banker Václav Skala has bought Kotva, an icon among Prague department stores which first opened some 36 years ago when then-Czechoslovakia was behind the Iron Curtain. The price of the deal? Around two billion crowns (the equivalent 80 million euros).

For the last half year the Czech Republic’s dominant electricity company and nuclear power plant operator ČEZ has been plagued by flawed safety checks at both of its nuclear power plants. It now turns out that the flawed checks continued for around a decade.

The Prague Public Transport Authority has begun ‘field testing’ a new tram, the low-floor EVO1. As of Monday this week, commuters on the No. 6 line were able to travel on the new transit vehicle and at the weekend the tram will be running again on the capital’s lines No. 5 and No. 7.

Retail sales in the Czech Republic climbed by 5.9 percent in 2015 compared to the previous year, the Czech Statistical Office has announced. That was the strongest sales performance since 2008, just before the country slumped into a long-lasting recession.

The number of young working Czechs has been decreasing since the early 1990s. The employment rate of people between the ages of 15 to 24 in the Czech Republic is the lowest in the EU, the Czech Statistical Office announced on Wednesday.

Czech hard coal miner New World Resources’ OKD unit wants to lay off half of its employees within the next two years. Although the move is not unexpected and the Czech government has been debating ways of softening its social impact, the lay-offs will present a serious problem in a region with a 19.2 percent unemployment rate.

After a long time on the back burner, the question of euro adoption seems to be making a comeback in the Czech Republic. Champions of the idea are now pointing out that the country fulfills nearly all the criteria for joining the euro-zone and the timing could hardly be better.

Adopting the euro would cost the Czech Republic around half a percent of gross domestic product, the state secretary for European Affairs, Tomáš Prouza, said on Friday.

The company Jan Becher- Karlovarská Becherovka which produces the famous Czech herbal liquor Becherovka created in 1807 has received close to one hundred million crowns in compensation for losses suffered during the government-enforced prohibition in 2012. No other company on the market received compensation.

A shakeup is taking place on the Czech market for tickets for concerts, sports and other events with the takeover of one of the biggest players Ticketstream by a smaller competitor, the news website iHned.cz reported.