HOW ŠOLAK BECAME THE RICHEST SERB: From selling VHS tapes to owning Southampton FC (1)

In a special series published over the next month, Kurir will reveal how exactly this controversial billionaire fulfilled his 'American dream' in the murky waters of the Balkan transition

The financial rise of the first Serbian billionaire Dragan Šolak started in the 1990s. To become the richest Serb, Šolak has come a long way, starting out as a VHS tape and CD salesman, proceeding to found the first cable television in the country, and ending up as the owner of a group that has in its portfolio over one hundred regional media outlets and assets estimated at over €3 billion. The son of Njegoš Šolak, who served as the dean of the Kragujevac Faculty of Economics in the early 1990s, Šolak struck out on his own in the murky Balkan business world at the time as a student at the Belgrade School of Electrical Engineering, where he soon dropped out. He got his first job at the Vans production company, which brought him into the world of CD and DVD trading. Realizing what sorts of business opportunities lay in this line of business, and given that copyright was not properly legally enforced in this region during the political sanctions, Šolak moved to Slovenia. With his wife Gordana, he started the company Taped Pictures (T.Pics for short) there, which sold films on CDs and DVDs, as well as importing and distributing films from the federal units of the former Yugoslavia.

The sources from the creative industry at the time reveal that Taped Pictures also released films on CDs and DVDs, and that lawsuits were filed against it multiple times to Slovenian courts over copyright, which is why it went into bankruptcy in 1998. Owing to his friendship with the then heads of PGP RTS, Šolak was able to base his business at PGP premises in Miklošičeva Cesta Street in Ljubljana, owned by PGP RTB since the 1980s. During the sanctions imposed on what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, PGP granted Šolak's company various rights to release and distribute films and music from its Slovenia and Croatia catalogues.

Using the sanctions and the unresolved property ownership issues between the federal units of the former Yugoslavia, Šolak attempted to register as the owner of PGP's business premises, prompting this label to pursue a lawsuit against him over a number of years. At the time when he was involved in selling discs in Slovenia, he partnered up with the company Continental Film, based in Zagreb. The two were soon in dispute over the licences for DVD editions of Disney's animated films. According to some sources, Šolak also had a licence to sell the products from the Zagreb-based Jugoton's Slovenia catalogue. In order to round off the production process, Šolak and his brother-in-law Dušan Radosavljević started Jukom – an audio and VHS tape-spooling company based in Kragujevac. The headquarters of his companies were initially at the address of his one-time family home in Zore Radulović Street, which was later sold so that the Kragujevac Bypass could be constructed. As a result, the two rented a section of a hall in the building formerly owned by the then defunct company Romanija, while they sold audio and VHS tapes from a kiosk located in the Kragujevac Basic Court building and from a discount liquor store owned by Radosavljević. However, in 1998 Šolak's Slovenia business suddenly went under, and Taped Pictures went into bankruptcy, with a large amount of unpaid debts to creditors.

But this seasoned wheeler and dealer from the 1990s murky business world had already spotted a new opportunity, which would rake him in untold wealth in the decades to come.

COMING UP NEXT: Šolak's return to Serbia and the start of his strategic partnership with George Soros

Bonus video: