Serbian Tycoon Karić Goes from ‘Submissive Servant’ to ‘I Want to Be Prime Minister’ in Eight Months

Serbian tycoon Bogoljub Karić announced that he intends to fight for the position of Prime Minister of Serbia and stated that he will be persistent and patient in this struggle, although he has not discussed his ambitions with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, who is his coalition partner in the Serbian Assembly.

– My ambition is to be Prime Minister. And I will work on being one, Karić stated for the Belgrade newspaper Blic, saying that he does not plan to replace the current Prime Minister Ana Brnabić as his plans are long-term.

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– I am patient, there is time for me, said Karić, explaining that he has not yet shared these plans and ambitions with the head of state Aleksandar Vučić “nor is there a reason to tell him” because Vučić is “a very busy man, leading Serbia.”

– It took eight months since Bogoljub Karić’s return to Serbia for him to go from ‘I will be a submissive servant of Serbia’ to ‘I want to be Prime Minister,’ Blic reports.

Karić, a businessman originally from Kosovo, built his empire during the regime of Slobodan Milošević.

After Milošević’s fall and the change of power, Karić fled to Russia under accusations of business malfeasance and illegal enrichment, managing numerous businesses of his and his brother Dragomir’s companies in Belarus and former Soviet republics from there, and returned to Serbia at the end of December 2016.

The Organized Crime Prosecutor’s Office previously suspended the investigation against Bogoljub Karić due to lack of evidence regarding the establishment of his former mobile phone company Mobtel and the provision of foreign currency loans from his Astra Bank to companies from Cyprus without guarantees, as well as the withdrawal of money from Mobtel, and this case was also dismissed due to the statute of limitations.

Bogoljub Karić’s business empire, which began in a family orchestra in Peć and the establishment of the first private company in then Yugoslavia in Peć, Kosovo, reached its peak in the 1990s during the rule of Slobodan Milošević, when the first mobile phone provider in Serbia – Mobtel with 49 percent state ownership was established, which later ended up in state ownership and was subsequently sold.

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Karić is at the head of the party Movement of Strengths of Serbia, a coalition partner of Aleksandar Vučić’s Progressives (SNS), and in an exclusive interview for Blic in March 2016, when he announced his return to the country, he said about the then Prime Minister and undisputed political leader in Serbia: “I believe in God and I believe in Aleksandar Vučić, I believe that he, as a new man and new hope for Serbia, will succeed with his energy that he does not spare, with his brain that he has, and with his vast experience, to enable Serbs to be their own in their own land, to not be afraid of anything and to be able to work and create freely in their country. That is the last hope for Serbia to stand on its feet.”