Slovak journalists have tracked down the country’s populist Prime Minister Robert Fico to the luxurious Capella Hanoi hotel in Vietnam after 12 days without information about the premier’s whereabouts.

Fico made a surprise visit to Moscow on December 22, where he met with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin as part of Fico's frenetic and unsuccessful negotiations to avert the end of Russian gas transit through Ukraine, which kicked in on January 1.

Fico has kept his travel plans away from the country’s journalists and diplomats, and since appearing in Moscow he has only communicated through his Facebook social media account.

In a video message posted on January 2 when it was clear none of Fico’s efforts or threats stopped Ukraine’s long-signalled move not to renew the Russian gas transit agreement, Fico accused Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskiy of “sabotage of the public finances of the Slovak Republic and harming of the financial interest of the whole of the EU”. 

In the video, Fico appeared on a chair in front of golden curtains, a small table with an antique telephone set and a large flat-screen TV in an antique framework. These details eventually led Slovak journalists to geolocate Fico using open-source intelligence tools,  tracing him to the Capella Hanoi's luxurious suite Madama Butterfly, the liberal daily DennikN wrote on January 3.  

Madama Butterfly is advertised as the grandest suite at the hotel and costs €6,203 per night, Slovak media were quick to point out. Capella Hanoi describes the suite as “a tragic love story between East and West” and offers a “fusion of culture highlighted by Vietnamese accents overlaying French art-décor interiors".

“The suite also features a well-equipped kitchen and a lavish outdoor bar” and invites vacationers to “feel Cio-Cio-San’s overflowing love for American Naval officer John Pikerton”, the Capella Hanoi website states.

The opposition slammed Fico for his luxurious vacation at a time when Slovak households and businesses are bracing for the impact of tax hikes and other measures introduced by Fico’s left-right government as part of the consolidation measures approved last autumn.

“We will make sure that every one of your disappointed voters, who suffers from high prices, chaos and failing services, will know this,” Michal Šimečka, chairman of the largest opposition party, liberal Progressive Slovakia, posted on his social media in a message directed “to Fico’s luxurious apartment in Vietnam”.

Hungarian investigative journalist Szabolcs Panyi noted that Fico’s official monthly salary is €11,200.  

It is not the first time that Fico’s high-end living has raised questions as to how he affords it on his official income. As bne IntelliNews covered last January, the purchase cost of Fico’s fancy apartment in Bratislava was estimated at between €750,000-€1mn, while his total income from his tax returns in the years 2004 to 2022 amounts to approximately €850,000.   

Fico visited Vietnam in October, saying he wanted to improve the relationship between the two countries, strained since the 2017 kidnapping of a former head of a state-run Vietnamese company Trinh Xuan Thanh.

Thanh was abducted by Vietnamese secret service agents, and using a plane lent to a Vietnamese delegation by the Slovak government, he was flown from Bratislava to Hanoi.

After Fico's cabinet fell in 2018, Sloakia recalled its ambassador from Vietnam. Speculation abounded in Slovak media that then Minister of Interior and Fico’s close collaborator in their populist Smer party, Robert Kaliňák, might have known about the whole operation. Kaliňák is now Slovakia’s minister of defence.

There has been a sizeable Vietnamese minority in Slovakia since the era of communist Czechoslovakia, which opened its borders to Vietnamese fleeing the 1960’s-1970’s war of independence.