In a special series, Kurir reveals how exactly this controversial billionaire fulfilled his 'American dream' in the murky waters of the Balkan transition.
Despite the controversial Serbian billionaire Dragan Šolak's efforts to pass himself off as a successful businessman up there with the best-known names in the business world, and his company as a modern Western-style corporation, the facts in his business bio tell a very different story.
While Dietrich Mateschitz, owner of Red Bull who the owner of United Group has often been compared to recently, had a vision and a top product, and invested huge funds marketing and conquering the market in the conditions of free competition, Šolak took every chance that he got to destroy his competitors, sidestep regulations, usurp public and private resources, and not pay his debts to the state and his creditors.
Such business practices, which resemble the primitive accumulation of capital in the Wild West more than the operations of a modern 21st-century European company, has allowed the owner of United Group to become a Euro-billionaire. Nevertheless, however much money he has invested in rebranding his name, he will never be able to erase what he has really done on his way to fortune.
Getting profits on someone else's dime
Šolak's business model, i.e. taking every opportunity to burden others with his business costs while pocketing all revenue streams, can be illustrated by many examples of sidestepping the law and usurping public and private property. What it looked like in practice is best seen in the case of PU Belgrade Power Plants, whose maintenance holes and heating supply lines in the capital of Serbia were illegally used for a number of years by Šolak's SBB, which had run about 60 kilometres of optical cables through them. To address the usurping of public property and many millions' worth of damage caused, Belgrade Power Plants filed a lawsuit in the summer of 2019 against Šolak's SBB, asking for EUR 110 million in damages.
The comprehensive list of charges, containing the exact routes where SBB's usurping activities were discovered, clearly reveals that Belgrade Power Plants first notified SBB in February 2004 that the latter was using the underground heating supply line installations to illegally lay optical cables. Then, in April 2009, the utility issued an order banning any and all further cable laying activities. Since SBB ignored all this and continued to use the publicly owned heating supply lines without proper authorization, Belgrade Power Plants and the City of Belgrade filed a lawsuit against it in August 2019.
As Kurir has reported before, in uncovering this fraud, which lasted for decades, Deputy Mayor of Belgrade Goran Vesić pointed out that Šolak was "using the city water supply system and the public lighting poles" in a similar fashion, adding that "SBB mounts amplifiers onto the utility poles to illegally obtain electricity directly from the streetlights, which is a crime."
This prompted The Electric Power Industry of Serbia (EPIS) to file a lawsuit to the Commercial Court, asking for EUR 1.18 million in damages for using the utility poles of the electricity distribution network in Belgrade, Kragujevac, Kraljevo, Niš, and Novi Sad, as well as the removal of the installations mounted illegally by SBB.
Responding to these allegations, SBB submitted only page one of the Decision of the Ministry of Capital Investments from 2004, when Velimir Ilić led this ministry, as the legal basis for using the PU Belgrade Power Plants' maintenance holes. The Decision provided SBB with a general permission to build a network in Serbia, which fact did not release the company from the obligation of obtaining urban planning-related permits at the local government level, or from paying the fee for using others' property.
Although SBB announced lawsuits against the city authorities and the media for uncovering this fraud, the lawsuits were never filed.
COMING UP NEXT: Usurping private property and illegal use of electricity taken from the people