The word 'tunnelling' was probably first used in this way in the Czech Republic (tunelování in Czech, tunelář for the person committing fraud) during the first half of the 1990s, when several large, previously privatised banks and factories unexpectedly wentbankrupt. It was discovered later that the managements of these companies were deliberately transferring company property and real estate into their own private businesses, sometimes in offshore locations.
The term became a common label for this kind of criminal activity among Czechs and Slovaks. The term subsequently appeared in specialized literature in English, and then in a broader literature during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s.
V Hradci máme také hodně tunelů, jen o nich většinou nevíme !
