PW: Boguta in New Venture

A major figure in the Central European publishing scene, Poland's Grzegors Boguta--who after going to jail for his activities as an underground publisher in Communist Poland survived to head and build up his country's leading private publishing house, PWN (Polish Scientific Publishers)--is stepping down. Boguta will soon resurface with a new project of his own, and he remains a significant shareholder of PWN--whose chief owners are American and other foreign investors.

Boguta joined PWN in April 1990 and proceeded to engineer the most successful privatization of a publishing company within the former Soviet bloc. It is now majority-owned by the Luxembourg Cambridge Holding group, whose chairman, James D. Jameson, was an assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Bush administration. As a publishing group, PWN owns Hungary's well-known Kossuth (management, reference, health and IT) and 50% of law publisher Yuricom in Ukraine. The holding group controls a significant share of a Chinese scientific/general publisher--said to be the country's largest private venture--and, through it, part ownership of the Beijing Literary Agency; it also holds equity in China's Books in Print (coupled with an online bookselling venture).