KURIR’S REPORTING ON ŠOLAK’S RUSSIAN CONNECTIONS RECEIVES MORE CONFIRMATION: International investigative media reveal a financial network leading to the Kremlin

The profile of Dragan Šolak and the highly problematic nature of his business, built through United Group, is increasingly attracting the attention of international anti-corruption investigators on a global level. The connections of Šolak, founder of United Group, with the finances of official Moscow and Russian oligarchs are particularly telling in the current period of global realignment, and Kurir’s earlier findings on the matter are being increasingly corroborated.

In its investigative texts about Šolak’s business empire, Kurir pointed out that this business was built under the guise of promoting pro-Western values and media freedom, while the true motive was always money—no matter where it came from. Our findings have completely dismantled the false image of concern for free speech, just as Šolak’s Russian connections have shattered the myth of a pro-European, pro-Western and anti-Russian narrative on which both the editorial policy of his media outlets and his publicly communicated business philosophy were based.

That all of this was a facade behind which Šolak concealed his offshore intrigues and numerous financial flows connected with Moscow—through Kuoni, whom the financial world dubbed “the Kremlin’s banker”—has been confirmed by the newly released findings of the Visegrad 24 investigative team.

“Gazprom manages to insert its employees into the Balkan media market through United Group and Wolfram Kuoni. Russian influence has also penetrated United Group, founded by the richest man in Serbia, Dragan Šolak. His long-time business partner and adviser, Swiss lawyer Wolfram Kuoni, was appointed chairman of the board of United Media, while at the same time serving as vice-president of the Swiss-Russian Gazprom Bank and as one of the closest associates of Gazprom’s CEO, Alexey Miller,” reports Visegrad 24.
This outlet emphasises that Kuoni also assisted Šolak and United Media, thereby “revealing part of Šolak’s mechanism which allows him to own N1 television, the American CNN franchise, while, as Slovenian media have discovered, simultaneously building his business in the background with a man influential in Russian circles—Wolfram Kuoni.”

The text further refers to Kurir’s reporting, stating among other things:

“As Kurir reports, Slovenian investigative journalist Bojan Požar published details concerning Šolak’s ‘Russian connection in the heart of Europe’. The reference is to the well-known Swiss ‘entrepreneurial lawyer’ Wolfram Kuoni, who even in 2015 attempted to become a member of the Swiss parliament, but failed despite enormous financial investments (Šolak’s or Russian ones—it remains an open question whose exactly) in his election campaign,” reads part of the Visegrad 24 article, which effectively confirms everything Kurir had previously written.

Visegrad 24 thus recalls the peculiar circumstance—also noted by us—that Kuoni served as vice-president of the Swiss-Russian Gazprombank and as chairman of the board of Šolak’s United Media until May 2022, that is, several months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“In February 2022, Swiss media, among other things, reported that ‘Kuoni’s Zurich law firm lives off wealthy Russians’, while Kuoni himself had played one of the key roles in the expansion of Šolak’s media empire since 2010,” the article notes, adding that both Kuoni and Šolak appear in the Malta Files and the Pandora Papers.

Visegrad 24 explains that Kuoni was the chief architect of the cover through which illegal transactions in Italy were hidden—above all, the purchase of luxury villas on the island of Sardinia for the needs of Russian companies. Because of these suspicious dealings, Italian media have also investigated Kuoni’s ties with Šolak and other tycoons and oligarchs. Kurir wrote about this as well, since all those connections made the front page of the daily newspaper La Verita.