After facing a complete debacle in the market competition with Serbia's Telekom, the owner of United Group, Dragan Šolak, is clutching at straws trying to save his business empire by reaching into the pockets of the Serbian people. Knowing that the debts amounting to billions of euros is all that is left of his dream of the monopoly in the regional telecommunications market, the controversial Serbian billionaire is now attempting to win in an arbitration case against the Serbian state and so line his pockets with hundreds of millions of euros belonging to the citizens of this country.
Šolak needs this money in order to repay the due debts of his company, which is faltering in the market. All estimates point to the likely possibility that the company will have to be sold to a new investor in order to avoid bankruptcy.
Đilas's business party returns to the scene
However, although he has unsolvable problems in his own backyard, Šolak has activated the mechanism for defending his interests in order to fight his competitors and pass himself off as a victim again, targeted by the Serbian state and the operator owned by its citizens.
To this end, the mechanism's political wing has been activated in the form of Marinika Tepić, Dragan Đilas's and his business party's on-duty spokesperson. In this distribution of roles, Tepić has once again been assigned the task of attacking Telekom's business operation by providing false information on both the amount of debt that this company has and the utility of incurring it.
For example, in a bid to present Telekom's alleged over-indebtedness, she inaccurately claimed that the Serbian operator's debt stands at 1.5 billion euros, adding that the debt amounted to only 468 million euros in 2017. This, however, was not enough for Šolak's media, so the Nova.rs website even modified her statement into a fabricated claim of the debt being close to 1.8 billion euros!
What Tepić failed to mention is the fact that Telekom was paying off the €468-million debt using the revenues it earned with a market share of only 20-25 percent, while the present debt is being paid off by far higher revenues and while controlling app. 50 percent of the market. If for some reason the Serbian state operator had decided not to get into more debt and so keep the amount of existing debt the same, by now it probably would have disappeared from the market, and Šolak would have had an absolute monopoly.
It is interesting that, as she discussed Telekom's business operation, Marinika Tepić did not compare the data to the business information relating to its main competitor – Šolak's United Group, whose debt is far greater, and its market share and business prospects significantly less favourable than those of Telekom.
Preserving his private wealth is Šolak's sole motivation
As United Group keeps losing users and content, and records less and less revenue, its owner has in recent months been flaunting his personal wealth by purchasing football clubs in the United Kingdom and the countries of the region. When the Group, which is co-owned by Šolak, faced a debt problem, he brought an arbitration case against the Serbian state in Washington, demanding to be paid over 500 million euros with interest.
In that case, Šolak hoped to have powerful allies in the international scene, who he had for years tried to win over by passing off the fight for his personal interests as the fight for the freedom of media and democracy. As this attempt has been exposed in a part of the international community, and the role of this controversial Serbian billionaire laid bare, he was forced to reactivate his well-oiled mechanism in order to protect his interests once again. Similar to how he used to attack his competitors, he is now using the same methods in order to protect his personal wealth, with a rigid approach and a lack of flexibility in his media sphere actions.
What is Šolak's mechanism
The mechanism to protect the interests of Dragan Šolak was set up in order to attack and launch dirty campaigns against anyone who stands in the way of the interests of United Group's owner. The mechanism consists of the media directly owned by United Media, Dragan Đilas's political party, and the media that this group controls by selling advertising space – the Direktno.rs portal and the NIN and Vreme weeklies. The so-called investigative media and non-governmental organizations have a special role in this mechanism, as they are the reserve creators of content which launches scandals and criminalizes specific targets in advance.
Kurir Editorial Staff
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