Telekom and other competitors of the UG have felt the strongest blows of Šolak’s mechanism: Bribed organizations and individuals carried out dirty work
The mechanism used by Dragan Šolak to weaken and eliminate competition ranks among the most persistent and unscrupulous business practices seen in Serbia, as well as in the wider region. As Kurir has revealed over the years, it is a network of connected politicians, instrumentalized media outlets, non-governmental organizations and useful individuals, formed with the aim of removing anyone who posed competition or an obstacle to extraordinary profits for Šolak’s companies.
The domestic company Telekom Srbija was certainly the main target of this mechanism because, in the past decade, thanks to a shift in its business strategy, it began dismantling the monopoly that the founder of United Group had held for years in the telecommunications sector and on which he had based astronomical growth and profit.
As soon as it became a threat to Šolak and his insatiable expansion, Telekom Srbija found itself under unprecedented attack from all permissible means and especially those that were not permissible. Šolak had only one goal – to destroy the domestic company, secure a monopoly for himself and provide a platform for further enormous enrichment.
Pressure on institutions
While formally advocating for a free market, Šolak’s United Group employed a wide range of methods: deceiving relevant regulatory bodies and bribing people within them, cartel agreements prohibited by law, using media influence, lobbying to create narratives and actions against competitors, unlawful penetration into all institutions influencing the market and legislative environment… The list goes on, and in past years Kurir’s investigations have shed full light on the grey zone surrounding Šolak’s business activities.
United Group’s media machinery, particularly N1 and Nova S, was tasked with creating and amplifying the predetermined narrative aimed at weakening and delegitimizing Telekom as a market competitor. Pressure through the media was extensively used to force anti-corruption bodies in Serbia to issue negative opinions on Telekom.
The mechanism for eliminating competition combined media pressure with business moves by United Group. Its political wing was extremely active in this yearslong campaign, and its main figure was, of course, Šolak’s business associate Dragan Đilas and his Party of Freedom and Justice. The public face of this campaign was Đilas’s right hand, Marinika Tepić.
Everything was calibrated to create pressure on institutions, accompanied by Šolak’s legal and financial maneuvers, concealed behind a dense offshore network, with the aim of discrediting Telekom and other rival companies, marginalizing them or making their business operations more difficult.
Thanks to the breadth of its reach, which was mostly enabled by money, this machinery was able to attack from multiple positions, creating the illusion of objective reporting and a credible fight for democratic values.
Thus, the media controlled by United Group, together with affiliated media and pseudo-media, as well as politicians and so-called independent experts, spread negative content about Telekom and other competitors, thereby destroying their reputation among the public, regulators and business partners. Thanks to penetration into relevant institutions, Šolak was able to launch unfounded investigations or favour certain reports, thus causing immeasurable harm to his competitors. Šolak had a clear plan for doing this, as loss of reputation hampers negotiations, affects the confidence of business partners and investors and can trigger regulatory or political pressure.
Šolak’s mechanism extended beyond Serbia’s borders whenever he needed to bolster his false reputation as a European-minded businessman with a Western profile, but also when additional fabricated material was required to discredit competitors. To that end, he relied primarily on the lobbying-political axis made up of Đilas and his supporters, individuals with a false aura of independent experts whom he often even employed in one of his dozens of companies, and in some cases also interest-linked MEPs or US congressmen. The main driving force behind these clandestine activities outside Serbia was the London-based lobbying house Highgate.
Attempts at internationalisation
This was a mechanism in full operation that, as we have written in numerous series, sought to secure international political weight for what was in fact a bare, unfair and often unlawful struggle to eliminate competition. This is the source of the attempts in previous years to secure the most negative possible assessment of Telekom’s business conduct in European Parliament reports on Serbia; the letter by a group of MEPs accusing the competition of pro-Russian activity; or the case of a letter in which a group of US congressmen, led by well-known Albanian lobbyists Ritchie Torres and James McGovern, asked then US President Joseph Biden to impose sanctions on disfavoured entities from Serbia, accompanied by a visit of Đilas’s MPs to Washington.
After the sale of a large portion of his business in Serbia and the decision by BC Partners, the majority owner of United Group, to remove him from corporate governance, Dragan Šolak has left room for an excellent insight into everything he had been doing, which Kurir had been writing about and warning of for years. We are now witnessing a time when these things have become much more visible and, we hope, more easily prosecutable by the competent authorities.
Kurir Editorial Team