Pandora Papers: BLAŽO’S HIDDEN COMPANY GIVEN 108 THOUSAND POUNDS

 

“Pandora Papers” and data from the British company register show that Croatian oil and gas consultants Vedran Perše and Jasminko Umićević forgave a debt of 108 thousand pounds to the hidden company of Blažo Đukanović from the British Virgin Islands, Victoria Bridge Finance Ltd. The company, which the three of them set up in London through affiliated companies, was used to inject money into Blažo’s offshore company.

The company Victoria Bridge Finance Ltd from the British Virgin Islands, whose real owner is Blažo Đukanović, set up a company DGT Energy in London on June 28, 2012. His partner in that business was Arcola International LTD company, for which there was no information on the beneficial owner in the leaked data.

However, after Arcola left in early 2015, Laymarsh Investments Limited (Laymarsh) and Artemis Ventures International Limited (Artemis), also from the British Virgin Islands, became new co-owners.

The official owner of these companies is Puffin Agencies Limited from Gibraltar – the same company that is the formal owner of the company that manages the trusts of Milo and Blažo Đukanović.

They all share the same director, Clambake Limited, and all business records are kept at the same address – in Switzerland.

Directors and official owners of Artemis Ventures International Limited and Laymarsh Investments Limited

 

Who are Đukanović’s hidden partners?

Documents from “Pandora Papers” show that the real owner of the Artemis company is a British citizen of Croatian origin, Vedran Perše, while the beneficial owner of the company Laymarsh is Jasminko Umićević.

An internal document of the law firm ALCOGAL states that Perše is the real owner of Artemis.

Umićević additionally hid the ownership by establishing the Laymarsh Trust, which owns shares in companies Laymarsh and Artemis – partners of Blažo Đukanović.

In late 2006, the two companies set up Deltagrip Trading LLP (Deltagrip), based in London, which trades in crude oil and petroleum products.

According to the data from the British register of companies, Alvarium Re Limited has control over Deltagrip, and its owner is Alvarium Investment Limited. It is this company that manages the network that enabled the Đukanović family to hide their business, which includes the same hired directors and fictitious owners as the companies whose real owners are Perše and Umićević.

In addition, Deltagrip is registered at the same address as the lawyers who certified the passports of Milo and Blažo Đukanović. DGT Energy, a company set up by Blažo, Umićević and Perše in London, was also located at that address.

Cash flows towards the company of Blažo Đukanović

Already during the first year, DGT Energy borrowed about 52 thousand pounds from Deltagrip in various currencies, U.S. dollars, pounds and Swiss francs, with an average interest rate of 4%.

 

In the same year, DGT Energy lent £ 46,000 to its founder, Victoria Bridge Finance Ltd, whose hidden owner is Blažo Đukanović, with an interest rate of 2%.

In 2014, DGT increased its debt to Deltagrip to around £ 68,000, and gave Blažo’s company an additional loan totalling around £ 60,000.

 

Already in 2015, DGT Energy borrowed additional money from Deltagrip – a total of 103 thousand pounds. It is interesting that this was a loan in U.S. dollars, and that the interest rate was reduced to 3.25%.

At the same time, DGT lent new funds to the company of Blažo Đukanović, who owed nearly 88 thousand pounds in mid-2015.

By mid-2016, the debt to Deltagrip was reduced by about 22 thousand pounds, and DGT Energy took additional loan of 73 thousand pounds from Caldero Investment.

During that period, DGT Energy reported unusually large losses due to currency conversions, over 23,000 pounds.

Total debt of DGT, which had almost no income, was around 155 thousand pounds.  Nonetheless, in mid-2016, that company continued to lend additional funds, over 10 8,000 pounds, to Blažo’s company Victoria Bridge Finance Ltd, its London-based daughter company.

By the end of March 2017, Deltagrip forgave the debt of over 65 thousand pounds to the company DGT Energy, to which Blažo’s company still owed the same amount – 108 thousand pounds.

In the following year, the financial statements do not state the names of the companies, only the amounts of taken and granted loans. Instead of the name of Blažo’s company, it is stated that it is an affiliated company, while the amount of debt remains the same as in the previous year.

At the end of March 2019, DGT Energy submitted its last financial statement, which shows that it did not pay its debts or recover its claims.

 

In February 2020, the voluntary liquidation of the company was initiated, and it ceased to exist in September of the same year.

Blažo Đukanović and Vedran Perše confirmed in their responses to the questions of MANS and ICIJ that the entire debt of Victoria Bridge Finance Ltd was written off.

Đukanović said that the company never started operating, nor did it have any value. The son of the President of Montenegro adds that the money taken through DGT was used to establish a business, but that in the end it was written off due to a failure.

“My career went in a different direction, and despite the costs of establishment and work, which we never recovered, the business organization was shut down”, Blažo Đukanović said.

His partner in DGT Energy, Vedran Perše, confirmed to us that the company wrote off the debt to Blažo’s company because it never started operating.

“This money did not go to Mr. Đukanović, nor did he benefit from it personally. It was used to pay the initial costs of external experts – lawyers, accountants, etc.”

This would mean that the London-based company DGT Energy did not pay its operating costs, but lent money to the parent company – Blažo’s hidden offshore company, which did it instead.

Neither Đukanović nor Perše wanted to reveal who the owner of Caldero Investment was, which also lent money to their joint company. There is no information about that company in the leaked documents.

 

Who are Verdan Perše and Jasminko Umićević

Vedran Perše has been in the oil business since 1984, when he worked for the Croatian oil company INA as a legal advisor. As early as 1992, he was appointed director of the British branch of INA (Inter Ina Limited) in London. Today, he owns several oil and gas companies in the UK and Croatia.

Perše is the director of the Central European Oil Company (CEOC) based in London, which in 2010 worked in the oil and gas fields in Croatia and Hungary.

Jasminko Umićević is known to the Croatian public as an oil consultant, and he was also on the supervisory board of several Croatian energy companies (INA-Projekti and LUK-INA). Until 2020, he was the owner of a Croatian company for trading on the energy market, “Oil and Gas Consulting”, which was taken over from him by Deltagrip in 2020.

Data from Deltagrip’s financial reports show that in 2013, through that London-based company, Perše and Umićević owned 50% of the shares of the Croatian company “Terminal Slavonski Brod”, which owns the oil terminals.

The company was also the owner of the Oil Terminals of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina Ploče (NTF), but in 2010 it initiated arbitration, claiming that the contract with it was illegally terminated. In 2013, an arbitration court in Paris ordered the Oil Terminals to pay Deltagrip seven and a half million euros or go out of business.

Vanja Ćalović Marković

Dejan Milovac