I’m proud to be Czech, but I also have fond memories of Canada
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Peter Formánek was born on 31 January 1939 as Petr Štolovský. He spent his childhood in a villa in Prague’s Vinohrady district, built by his grandfather, banker Rudolf Tuna. His mother Jarmila was married three times - to the artist Zbyněk Štolovský, the lawyer Vladimír Záděra and the car racer Vladimír Formánek. The latter was arrested in 1950 and sent to the forced labour camp in Kladno for two years. Due to his poor personnel record, Peter Formánek trained as an auto mechanic, but while working he went to evening secondary school and then graduated from the University of Economics in Bratislava. After graduating in 1963, he joined the army and shortly afterwards married for the first time, but the marriage did not last long. In the second half of the 1960s he went to Moscow for work, where he worked as a clerk at the International Bank for Economic Cooperation. He was working there during the August 1968 occupation of CzechoslovakI. In October of that year he returned to Czechoslovakia and emigrated to Canada with his family. In Canada he built a successful career in banking and insurance. In 1975 he married for the second time, and he and his wife Suzanne had two children. In 1992, at her urging, he returned to Czechoslovakia for the first time. They settled here permanently in 1994. Peter Formánek has served as President of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Chairman of the Board of the Vodafone Foundation and Honorary Consul of Jamaica. He and his wife also devoted themselves to philanthropy. In 2025, he and his wife lived in Prague.
