Belgrade, Jan 21, 2004 - Business magnate Bogoljub Karic has accused the deputy leader of G17 Plus, Mladjan Dinkic, of being in the pay of “foreign mentors”.
Karic, whose business empire flourished under the patronage of the Milosevic regime, told B92 that Dinkic had manipulated state institutions in a quest to liquidate the Karic’s Group’s Astra Bank and block the accounts of the group’s Mobtel telecommunications company.
This was done, said Karic, on the order’s of Dinkic’s “foreign mentors, who are financing him to ruin Serbia’s banking system and economy”.
Karic was responding to questions put to him after he was seen leaving a meeting with Democratic Party of Serbia leader and prime minister designate Vojislav Kostunica.
Ask whether he had discussed Mobtel and the excess profit tax levied on the company while Dinkic was governor of the Serbian National Bank, Karic said that this was not necessary.
“There’s no need for us to discuss excess profit, because Dinkic needs to answer to the people of Serbia, and he’ll have to do that very soon.
“I can hardly wait for him to become finance minister so that I can ask him questions on a daily basis.
“He told the people of Serbia that 27 billion Deutschmarks had been stolen from the country and pledged to return all that money, saying he would charge companies which had earned excessive profits 8.3 million Deutschmarks.
“Then he charged them 120 million,” said Karic.
The head of the Karic Group claimed that Dinkic had subsequently ordered the state’s Payments Operations Bureau not to accept the first 29 million instalment of excess profit tax so that he could justify ordering Astra Bank placed in receivership.
“There are statement from the directors and staff of the Payment Operations Bureau to back this up: they were ordered not to accept the first instalment,” said Karic.
Nothing sinister, says Kostunica deputy
The meeting with Kostunica, he said, was to chat about his recent trip to Croatia and the discussions he held with business leaders there.
The deputy leader of Kostunica’s party told B92 that there had been nothing secret about the meeting with Karic, and that it was a normal business meeting for men in their position.
“One of them is the president of a party and prime minister designate, the other is the president of the Association of Industrialists and Businessmen. There’s no scandal in it. These are regular business dealings in the course of a serious day’s business,” said Dragan Marsicanin.
“Suspicious”
Political commentator Misa Brkic said this afternoon that the meeting aroused suspicion that certain business circles would bring pressure to bear on the new government.
“The whole campaign of the Democratic Party of Serbia for the parliamentary elections was based on the fact that the government they had tried to bring down was connected to certain business circles.
“If that is true, who gives the current prime minister designate the right to meet and negotiate with those business circles even before he has been elected?
“I don’t know how a coalition government, which in addition to the Democratic Party of Serbia will include G17 Plus, is going to tolerate the influence of business circles which include Bogoljub Karic,” Brkic told B92.
|