Following a well-known routine, Marinika Tepić, an employee of Multikom, a company owned by Dragan Đilas, has once again attacked Serbia's Telekom on behalf of her boss in order to tarnish the reputation of this company and jeopardize its more than successful business operation in recent years.
What was evidently a contract attack against a company owned by the people of Serbia was readily picked up and continued by the media outlets which are part of the mechanism for protecting Dragan Šolak's interests. Telekom has been a thorn in Šolak's side for many years, and he had set destroying it as his strategic business goal.
The mechanism of the attack and the vacuity of the allegations – this time levied against the CEO of Telekom, Vladimir Lučić – clearly indicate that the motivation behind this attack was Dragan Šolak's personal revenge against a man who had dealt him a crushing business blow in Serbian and Montenegrin markets as well as across the region.
Destroying Telekom as a sole business strategy
Accustomed to having no competition whatsoever, and alive to the fact that in healthy market competition, where profits are not made by lawlessly laying cables, plundering state resources, and monopolistic market division agreements, his company stands almost no chance, United Group's owner has staked all his resources on a single card – a dirty campaign against his arch competitor.
To this end, Šolak has bolstered the previously set-up mechanism, whose sole role is to crush anyone who stands in the way of his private interests. It is precisely this mechanism that was activated on this occasion as well, with Multikom employee Marinika Tepić, who has been passing herself off as a political activist of the party owned by Dragan Đilas, attackingd Telekom's legitimate business decisions for the umpteenth time.
In a display of hypocrisy, Tepić disputed Telekom's right to run its operation under market principles and made allegations against its CEO Lučić, the manager that much of the credit for the great success that the biggest telecommunications operator in Serbia has had in recent years goes to.
Tepić: 'Telekom acts as an intermediary in prostitution and paedophilia!'
In the latest – and so far the dirtiest – instalment of the smear campaign mounted for years against Telekom Serbia, Marinika Tepić accused Vladimir Lučić and Telekom's subsidiary in Montenegro of promoting paedophilia and acting as an intermediary in prostitution via the Kis app as a dating platform, which she claimed was an M:tel investment!
At the same time, Multikom's best-known employee accused Lučić of payments M:tel allegedly made to Aca Đukanović and Vladimir Beba Popović's institute, presenting business-related facts known to the general public as an investigation finding and casting all this in a negative light.
It is interesting that Tepić illustrated the allegations regarding the supposed damage caused to Telekom by citing data about the 19-percent growth of revenue year on year! As always, Tepić failed to explain why market expansion is detrimental to Telekom but not, for example, to Dragan Šolak's United Group. In a similar vein, she also managed to avoid the question asked by a Kurir reporter regarding whether in this case – given that she works for Multikom and United Group, and passes herself off as a politician – she perhaps had a more serious conflict of interest than usual, devising and launching vacuous campaigns on behalf of her boss.
The mechanism in top gear
The fact that everything in this story, from beginning to end, was orchestrated at a single centre – i.e. in Dragan Šolak's mind – is clear from a number of events that followed Marinika Tepić making fresh new false claims.
Specifically, TV N1 broadcast Marinika Tepić's public appearance live, and her statement was picked up on the double by all the other media outlets from Šolak's portfolio. The Nova.rs web portal ran the story as early as 2.10 pm – while Tepić's press conference was still going on – and the Direktno.rs portal ran it at 2.12 pm.
What was immediately apparent from their stories is that they were modelled after a preconstructed narrative, which suggests that the reporters of these media outlets had Marinika Tepić's "exclusive materials" ready beforehand.
Furthermore, given the routine operation of Šolak's mechanism, it would come as no surprise if in the coming days a further attack against Telekom were to be delivered by the so-called investigative portals CCRN (KRIK), BIRN, and CIJS (CINS), as well as their affiliated non-governmental organizations CRTA, Istinomer, and Cenzolovka. They represent the so-called replacement trust, in charge of strengthening the trust in what Šolak's spokespersons and media send out, but behind which are hidden United Group's owner's business interests. Given that NIN and Vreme are also part of Šolak's mechanism for destroying competition, it would come as no surprise if this topic were to feature in the upcoming issues of these weeklies.
Kurir Editorial Staff
