ŠOLAK’S DOUBLE DEALING LAID BARE: Italians too report on his ties with suspicious Russian capital
The business network spun by Dragan Šolak, owner of United Group and currently the richest Serb, is being laid bare beyond Serbia’s borders – at places that the suspect business activities of this billionaire have reached. Italy is only the last in a long line of countries in which the media are focusing on a “TV tycoon that catches his bait using a network of Russian companies,” as it is stated in an article of the daily La Verità.
The article debunks Šolak’s role in preserving the Russian capital in Europe and being the mainstay in the relationship between Belgrade and Moscow. In this, special emphasis is given to his main Russian connection – Wolfram Kuoni, known as the “banker of the Kremlin”, which Kurir has already reported on.
This Italian newspaper feature has only confirmed that Šolak plays a double game: he has built a media empire which is presented in the public sphere as distinctly pre-Western and pro-European, while at the same time developing business operations based on firm relations with Russia and the circles close to Moscow behind the scenes. Some Slovenian media have recently reported on this, and now it has become the topic of a more detailed investigation by the abovementioned Milan daily. Šolak has been the topic in Swiss and Greek media as well.
“Dragan Šolak, a Serbian billionaire in the media and telecommunications sector, has always held a pro-Western and pro-European position, and yet he has essentially managed to maintain close ties to Russia and the circles in Bulgaria that are close to Moscow. One needs only to recall the operation by which Šolak and Krassimir Guergov, a businessman based in Sofia, have changed multiple times the ownership of a large Serbian company Direct Media through various offshore companies. According to the journalists there, the share of a group of Serbian tycoons led by Swiss lawyer Wolfram Kuoni has been behind the changing ownership of Direct Media,” La Verità reports.
The article also says that Dragan Šolak’s name appears in a database of special clients of the large Swiss bank Credit Suisse, as discovered by the financial investigation titled Swiss Secrets. In this database, where Šolak can also be found, a great number of bank accounts have been discovered held by suspicious persons, e.g. drug dealers, corrupt politicians, spies, and the functionaries of various dictatorships.
“Two accounts at the Swiss bank are held by Šolak, associated with the ties between Šolak, the highest circles of power in Russia, and the Swiss lawyer Wolfram Kuoni – the very same person who engages in the purchasing and selling of Bulgarian media on Šolak’s behalf,” La verità reports.
Information on what have so far been Dragan Šolak’s untraceable business activities are gaining more and more space in the EU media as they reveal a very intriguing truth – Šolak and his United Group have for years had secret and suspicious business arrangements with influential people in Russia, even as they were increasing their profits enormously and enhancing their credibility based on a false narrative of having an anti-Russian stance and upholding the European values. However, more and more information in the European media is bringing Šolak’s business to light and confirming everything that Kurir has reported on multiple occasions relating to the suspicious nature and aims of those business activities.
The uncovered double game is but one in a range of “weapons” from the arsenal of Šolak’s political and media mechanism for the destruction of his competitors, the unstoppable profit turning, and the amassing of enormous personal wealth. This is the context in which all United Group’s attempts at gaining a foothold in the European institutions, such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development or the European Parliament, should be understood.
Kurir has recently reported on the most recent action by Šolak’s machinery – engaging the Highgate consultancy lobbyists to influence the content of the reports of Serbia, and so clear the field of his main competitors and salvage his own business in the country. Šolak very much needed an image of a pro-European person to expand his business, so he left nothing to chance. For example, he made sure to have his own people in all the places where decisions were made regarding his lucrative business operations. The case of the current United Group’s Vice President for Corporate Affairs, Dragica Pilipović, is one of the most telling in this respect, as she joined United Group’s top management straight from the post of a director at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
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In recent months, she took part in a special task of communicating with the representatives of the European Parliament. As Kurir has reported before, since May 2021, Pilipović has had no fewer than three meetings with the representatives of the European Parliament, with the main topic being the media sphere in Serbia.
The ties between Šolak and Kuoni have also uncovered the part of Šolak’s mechanism which allows him to simultaneously have TV N1 – a franchise of the American CNN - and, as the Slovenian media has discovered, build his business behind the scenes with a man influential in the Russian circles – Wolfram Kuoni. As picked up by Kurir, the Slovenian investigative journalist Bojan Požar has published details regarding Šolak’s “Russian connection at the heart of Europe.”
“It is the famous Swiss ‘attorney for the entrepreneur’ Wolfram Kuoni, who even made a bid in 2015 to become an MP in the Swiss parliament, but failed – despite huge financial injections (Šolak’s, the Russian’s – it’s anybody’s guess) for his election campaign. Kuoni was actually the vice-president of the Swiss-Russian Gazprombank and served as the chairman of Šolak’s United Media board until May 2022, i.e. for several months after the Russian attack against Ukraine. In February 2022, the Swiss media outlets reported, among other things, that ‘Kuoni’s law practice from Zurich lives off of rich Russians’, and Kuoni himself has had one of the biggest roles in expanding Šolak’s media empire since 2010. He too – attorney-at-law Kuoni – can be found alongside Šolak and the Slovenian Tomaž Jeločnik in the infamous Malta Files and the Pandora Papers,” Požar says in his piece on Šolak.
The Italian general public finds Kuoni interesting for a similar reason – it is through him that the Russian companies have luxury villas on the elite island od Sardinia, resulting in the newspaper piece concerned with his ties with Šolak and other tycoons and oligarchs landing the front page of the daily La verità. Wolfram Kuoni has been the CEO or the former CEO of at least 13 companies registered in the Alpine state of Lichtenstein. These companies serve “to protect the end user”, i.e. they are a front for Russian companies. Some of their business operations, tied into the “corporate structure” Ansalt, were so suspicious that Lichtenstein’s oversight bodies shut them down.
“Some of these Kuoni’s end users have offices in Italy, i.e. they are registered with an accountant based in Olbia, Sardinia. The reason is simple – they are used as fronts for the owners of the villa complex on the Sardinian Emerald Coast. The villas belonged to Alexey Miller and the top managers with ties to him,” the Italian daily reported.
As the piece further elaborates, it is a part of the Sardinian coast where Russians feel at home – “Villa Violina, a luxury complex dear to tycoon Alisher Usmanov and sold last summer to an Australian tycoon, is just a few steps away from the villas owned by the Russian companies.” In 2010, the Sardinian police raided the complex of nine villas owned by Russian companies based on a tip that a large number of weapons was located in them.
“Wolfram Kuoni then signed a formal protest to the Italian authorities on behalf of the seven Lichtenstein companies run by himself,” La verità reports.
The Italian journalists point out that Alexey Miller is the only big Russian oligarch who has not been targeted by the EU sanctions, but that sanctions against him have been imposed by the US and the UK.
“The reason for this might lie in the importance that his company has for supplying Europe with gas, or at least the importance it had in the past – in the first phase of the attack against Ukraine. Instead, sanctions were imposed on Arkady Rotenberg – a person who, like Miller, is also very close to the Kremlin and whose presence has in recent years been registered on multiple occasions on the Sardinian estate,” the Italians note.
The article emphasizes the importance of Gazprombank in Switzerland, at which Kuoni had been the vice-president until March 2022.
“Piles of money from Moscow went through that bank in Zurich, ending up in personal accounts of people with close ties to the Kremlin. For example, music star and multimillionaire Sergei Roldugin, a great friend of the Kremlin and suspected to be its puppet… Roldugin has a number of offshore funds, discovered in 2016 in the investigative Panama Papers. The same database contains an array of offshore companies associated with Wolfram Kuoni or his wife Maria, who is originally from Serbia,” La verità reported.
The article also makes mention of another oligarch close to Kuoni – the Ukrainian Kostyantyn Zhevago.
“Zhevago is originally from Donbas and is suspected of ties with the pro-Russian autonomy proponents (which he has always denied). He is currently facing a trial in Kyiv, where he is accused of money laundering and other criminal offences related to the bankruptcy of his bank in Ukraine, from which USD 113 million had simply disappeared,” the Italian daily says.
(Kurir.rs)
