By Dragana Pećo

CINS uncovers assets of assassin overlooked and untouched by authorities.

After police arrested Milorad “Legija’ Ulemek, the special forces mob boss who ordered the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in 2003, the Serbian Prosecutor’s Office went looking for his assets to claim.  Ulemek should have had plenty – the crime figure ran the lucrative Zemun clan for years and had been taking a cut of most of its actions.  But when they went looking, they found very little.

The Center for Investigative Reporting in Serbia (CINS), may have found some of those missing assets.  CINS has found that Ulemek, using the fake name Vlado Vukomanović founded an offshore firm in Panama with his wife back in 2001 that remains active today.  It is not clear what assets it holds.

Legija was sentenced to 40 years for crimes including ordering Đinđić’s death, kidnappings and murders.

After arresting him in 2004, prosecutors opened a financial investigation of the former commander of the Special Operations Unit [JSO].  They seized some property in the Cerak area of Belgrade  -- worth a few hundred thousand Euros.

However, in testimony members of his gang estimated he earned far more in a decade-long run of extortion, kidnappings, murder, drug trafficking and other crime perpetrated by the Zemun gang, an organized crime group based in the Belgrade suburb of Zemun. Maybe tens of millions of Euros, they thought.

For example, Ulemek collected half the ransom for all kidnappings while the rest of Zemum divvied up the other half., according to testimony from Dejan Milenković Bagzi. From just four kidnappings (of Milija Babović, Miroslav Mišković, Vuk Bajrušević and Suad Musić) the clan collected about €20 million, meaning Ulemak’s take was €10 million. But the local prosecutor’s office managed to find and confiscate only a 178-square-meter plot in Belgrade, with an estimated value of about €200,000.

Prosecutors refused to discuss their attempts with journalists from CINS.

In an interview with CINS, Mile Novaković, the former chief of criminal police for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, said that prosecutors and police could have done a better job uncovering the mobster’s assets.

“They didn’t undertake as detailed an investigation as they maybe could have,’’ Novaković said.

Maybe.

CINS reporters, working nine years after Legija’s arrest and without subpoena powers, discovered another potentially lucrative asset -- an offshore company Ulemek registered in Panama with a fake name and a forged Croatian passport.

The central American country of Panama, is one of the more popular offshore countries local business owners and criminals use to hide assets or to avoid taxes.

According to documents from the country’s business registry, Legija, his wife Aleksandra Ivanović, and an unknown person named Anđela Klobučar founded the company ‘’Stone Wall Shipping & Trading, S.A.’’ on Sept. 20, 2001.

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