A Caribbean haven for biogas assets
Matej Zwitter
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The Pandora Papers reveal how a group of businessmen from the northeastern Slovenian region of Štajerska moved assets of biogas plants via offshore companies to hide them from creditors. They were built a decade ago by Keter Group, at the time »the leading Slovenian provider of biogas plants«.
Illustration: Samira Kentrić
»The global financial crisis plunged many companies into crisis in 2011, which is why we are especially proud to be an exception«, said Miran Hrženjak, the then CEO of the Maribor-based company Keter Organica, in their business report for the year.
He had reason to be optimistic. Keter Organica, which was involved in the design and construction of biogas power plants, had by then built or upgraded twelve biogas plants, mostly for investors in eastern Slovenia.
The company was described by the media as »the leading provider of biogas plants«. In just two years, the company increased its revenue 840-fold, from less than 20,000 euro in 2009 to 16.6 million euro in 2011.
But in the end the remarkable story of Keter Group unfolded in line with the financial crisis scenario, only with a delay of a few years. The company’s growth was fuelled by bank loans that proved too high for investors to repay.
In the final stages, the banks transferred 43.3 million euro of defaulted debts owed by over-indebted investors in Keter’s biogas plants to the state. Bad loans were later taken over by the state-owned Bank Assets Management Company (BAMC).
As one of the investors, who wished to remain anonymous, told Oštro, they were assisted in raising bank loans by Keter Group, which at the time promoted itself as the only provider of turnkey biogas plants.
Ultimately, the majority of them had to hand over the keys to their biogas plants to liquidation managers. One such investor was Domen Jurša, a self-employed entrepreneur from Ljutomer. In 2011, Keter built a biogas plant for him in Središče ob Dravi and fthree years later BAMC filed a court petition to start a bankruptcy procedure against Jurša.
»I was cornered«, he explained to BAMC in 2014 when they requested clarifications about the lease agreement he struck with a company called Pulverem, documents presented to the District court Ptuj by BAMC show.
It is unclear who exactly backed Jurša into a corner, however Oštro’s investigation revealed that Pulverem, a serial leaser of biogas plant, was part of a network of companies that gradually transferred ownership of assets of Keter-built biogas plants in 2013 and 2014 to insulate them from creditors.
When one of the first biogas plants, located in Zgornje Pirniče, went bankrupt in 2013, a company called Solvus emerged. It was owned by an unknown businessman Milan Strnad from Rače. Solvus bought defaulted debts owed by the plant owner to four Keter companies and consequently, through an enforced payment, appropriated 413,000 euros of biogas plant equipment.
Strnad’s company sold the remainder of defaulted debts it had bought to the company of a Maribor-based financial advisor Roman Hübl. His company, most likely using debt set-off, bought another generator worth 395,000 euro from the biogas plant in Zgornje Pirniče.
The Pandora Papers show that Strnad and Hübl operated via the same British Virgin Islands company – RH International. The company’s beneficial owners changed twice between 2013 and 2016 and ultimately it was Strnad that formally took it over. Oštro’s investigation reveals that RH International had been implicated in bankruptcy procedures of at least three biogas plants.
Photo: Matej Povše
Expert on defaulted debts
Hübl, who has experience in insolvency proceedings listed on his LinkedIn profile, took over as director of Strnad’s company Solvus in November 2014. Very soon afterwards, Solvus petitioned to initiate a bankruptcy proceeding.
By then, at least 2.2 million euro had been ploughed into Solvus from Keter Organica through a subsidiary. Keter Organica invested this as recapitalisation, while Solvus recorded it as loans – that it never repaid.
Keter Organica’s investments were consequently never recouped and three years later it went bankrupt. The liquidation manager approved 12.9 million euro of claims by creditors, but the company has been depleted of all assets. He was only able to realise assets worth just over 6,000 euro, which he used to partially cover the costs of the proceedings.
Keter Invest, once the holding company of Keter Group, dissolved in a similar manner. The bankruptcy administrator approved as much as 73 million euro of claims, of which roughly a third were BAMC’s. Despite such vast sums, the company had no assets.
A decade after Keter Group’s rise, its loan operations remain the subject of law enforcement investigations. The Specialised State Prosecutor's Office for instance told Oštro that three persons linked to Keter Invest are under investigation on suspicion of falsification or destruction of business documents and fraud, and deception in obtaining loans.
In addition, they have submitted a request for an investigation on suspicion of money laundering against two persons linked to Keter Invest, but the court hasn’t decided on the case yet.
Partners in Belize
In the receivership of Solvus, Hübl as the CEO, recommended a change of the company's core business activities. Until then, the company had been involved in debt buying, but the new focus would be on electricity production, he explained in the company’s 2015 restructuring plan.
In autumn 2014, Solvus leased a biogas plant in Središče ob Dravi after the plant’s owner, the self-employed entrepreneur Domen Jurša, ran out of money because he could not pay the high loan instalments.
It appears that Solvus negotiated favourable lease terms with the help of Mutui, a company headed by Hübl’s business partner Urška Čuješ. Mutui enforced the repayment of Jurša’s unpaid debt of 341,000 euro by Jurša by taking over a part of the biogas plant equipment.
Six months later, Hübl and Jurša signed an anex to the lease agreement that stated: »The parties hereby agree that the biogas plant equipment is not owned by the lessor.« This was also one of the reasons for a 50% reduction in lease payments, from 10,000 euro to only 5,000 euro per month.
In 2016, RH International took over Solvus, but this was merely a formality. The Pandora Papers disclose that during that time Strnad in fact controlled both companies.
The following year, he embarked on a new business.
»Zohra, I have a new order from Milan Strnad«, an employee of the Dubai-based corporate registrar SFM informed her coworker in March 2017, an internal email shows.
Strnad had also planned to set up a company named MF International in Belize, however Oštro could not found a confirmation in the Pandora Papers that he had in fact registered it. The documents reveal that in May 2017 he established a company in Belize with a different name, Pro International.
Pro International was soon taken over by Roman Stropnik, who was at that time under investigation by the Slovenian financial administration for failure to pay VAT, as reported by Oštro in a Pandora Papers investigation last week.
In the company’s business plan, which he provided to SFM, Stropnik stated that Pro International would be engaged in buying receivables, mainly in the construction sector. In a telephone call with Oštro, though, he claimed that the company had been established to carry out a business project that had fallen through.
What this was remains unclear, but the project may have been connected with real estate on the Croatian coast. In the company’s business plan, Stropnik listed a contact number that no longer exists, but was then used by Polaris, a Croatian company. Polaris’ assets included land near the village of Pirovac in central Dalmatia.
From September 2017, the CEO of Polaris was Roman Hübl.
A campsite in Dalmatia
Solvus’ lease on the biogas plant in Središče ob Dravi came to an end at the time; the plant was taken over by Bioen, a company owned by Oleg Maksimov, a Russian citizen. Bioen later also took over Solvus, thereby ending the lease.
Under the agreement, RH International received 150,000 euro for the sale of Solvus, however the money wasn’t deposited into the company’s own bank account, but into a fiduciary account of the law firm Ketiš, Janžekovič in partnerji in Maribor.
According to publicly available information, this law firm represents Rok Snežić, under investigation by the Specialised State Prosecutor's Office on suspicion of aiding abuse of position or trust in a companies, in a series of lawsuits against journalists with a Slovenian news portal Necenzurirano.
Until February 2020, lawyers Andrej Ketiš and Goran Janžekovič also owned a Maribor-based company Pretiosa. According to information from the Bosnian Prosecutor’s Office, Pretiosa allegedly made payments to Tanja Subotić Došen, a Bosnian citizen. A document by the Bosnian Prosecutione published by the local news portal Istraga shows that Subotić Došen was an alleged associate of Rok Snežić and former mayor Miran Vuk. Prosecutors believe the payments supported tax evasion.
The law firm Ketiš, Janžekovič in partnerji did not respond to questions from Oštro.
It is not clear where the money from the sale of Solvus, 150,000 euro, ended up but information on business operations of Polaris suggests that it may have in fact ended up in Croatia. Only a day before the sale of Solvus, Polaris decided to increase its capital by almost the exact same amount: 149,000 euro.
By 2018, a campsite with ten mobile homes had been built on Polaris’s land near Pirovac and the company advertised them, among other places, on the Slovenian online marketplace Bolha.si.
After registering unpaid taxes from the part of Polaris of more than a quarter million euro by 2019, the Croatian Tax Administration filed a bankruptcy petition for the company. But Polaris paid outstanding taxes and the bankruptcy proceedings were halted.
Shortly afterwards, the campsite in Pirovac was bought by the Croatian company Mutui, whose manager was Roman Hübl, and Polaris went bankrupt. Creditors were left empty-handed as the company no longer had any assets. Polaris owed 170,000 euro in taxes to the Croatian Tax Administration alone.
Milan Strnad did not respond to Oštro’s questions about business operations of Solvus, RH International and Pro International. In his written response, he asserted only that all his companies had operated legally, and that he does not want »to take part in conspiracy speculations you are implicating me in«.
Hübl is still the CEO of the Croatian company Mutui and until the end of 2019 also managed the Slovenian namesake that went into bankruptcy last November. The Slovenian state is its largest creditor with a claim of 55,000 euro, however, judging by reports from the bankruptcy administrator, the assets of the Slovenian Mutui are unlikely to be sufficient to repay the creditors.
At least some of the assets were probably ‘lost’ in the British Virgin Islands as RH International still owes Mutui 126,000 euro. The company based in the tax haven has not been responding to requests from the bankruptcy administrator.
According to the administrator’s findings, Hübl moved a further 150,000 euro in assets from creditors in two business transactions in 2019. He sold land in the vicinity of Ptuj and transferred money from the sale to the Croatian company Mutui that he was leading. In addition, he sold a claim against the Croatian Mutui to a former business partner who owns a house in the suburbs of Maribor where Hübl lives.
Hübl did not respond to questions sent to him by email. The letter sent to his home address was returned, even though his social media posts indicated that he was at home.
The entrepreneur Domen Jurša had gone into personal bankruptcy. Because he had put up all his assets as loan collateral, he had to pay a share of his personal income that exceeded the legal minimum into the bankruptcy estate until this February. The bankruptcy administrator also sold his apartment in Ljutomer.
Mašenjka Bačić (Oštro Croatia) contributed reporting for this story.
The production of this investigative story was supported by a grant from the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund.
