The Fugitive and His Two Medusas
Anuška Delić
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In 2014, former car salesman Dragan Đurić was convicted of tax evasion and business fraud. He abscond to Bosnia and Herzegovina and, as revealed by the Pandora Papers, continued to operate from there in secret via a company from the Seychelles. Đurić remains a fugitive.
Illustration: Milanka Fabjančič
»He was addicted to drugs and alcohol at the time, which is why he needed money, and he couldn’t get a job because of his illness. He met Đurić at the train station in Ljubljana and Đurić promised him 50 euros for every car he sold, assuring him it was a legal business.«
This is how, in 2014, the court in Krško described the beginning of cooperation between Dragan Đurić, a car salesman, and Aleš, an addict from Brežice at the time. They were both convicted of tax evasion, and Đurić was later also convicted of corporate fraud by a court in Ljubljana.
Đurić bought used cars in Germany and imported them to Slovenia. The cars were paid for by Aleš’s shell company in cash that was handed to him by Đurić. After buyers purchased the cars, Aleš withdrew their payments from the company’s account and gave the money to Đurić.
In less than two months, they imported 31 used passenger cars and evaded value-added tax (VAT), which was stated fraudulently on the invoices. The Slovenian Financial Administration detected 58,000 euro of unpaid VAT during this period alone.
This, it seems, was not the only problem Đurić had with the Financial Administration. As late as June this year he appeared on the list of tax defaulters with debts between half a million and a million euros. At the end of August he was no longer on the list, although, as confirmed to Oštro by the police, he remains a fugitive.
His actual tax debt might be even considerably higher, the Pandora Papers show. As early as in 2010, Đurić secretly founded a company called Medusadoo LTD in the Seychelles. Initially he had considered another name, Lobi LTD.
Just like the two people at the centre of Oštro’s first two stories based on the Pandora Papers – Marko Glinšek and Roman Stropnik – Đurić also decided to open a bank account on the Caribbean island country of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.
At the time, he was also the owner of the Slovenian company Medusa, d. o. o., which had 14 million euros total revenue in the last financial year for which reports are available.
Business operations of the Slovenian Medusa may have in fact involved Medusadoo from the Seychelles that Đurić set up through the local office of All About Offshore (AABOL), a corporate agent whose documents were leaked to more than 600 reporters of the Pandora Papers investigation.
According to Đurić, Medusadoo with a share capital of 100,000 dollars would deal with »the sale of copper (metals), scrap copper, crude oil and diesel, and other services«.
Massive revenue growth
The ruling of the court in Krško shows that Dragan Đurić started flipping cars in 2006 at the latest. Aleš, the former addict from Brežice (his full name will not be disclosed due to the time elapsed since then), told the court they had met the year Đurić had »a car dealership on Dolenjska cesta in the Ljubljana district of Rudnik«.
At the time, Đurić was in fact the owner of a company called Medico Trade, which, according to the court's findings, sold cars at a dealership on Dolenjska cesta in Ljubljana.
The official dealer was the shell company Diaden. Its incorporation documents were prepared by Đurić, while Aleš became the official director. Đurić called him to come to Ljubljana whenever necessary, for example, to sign documents.
They met in a bar near the train station. Aleš told the court he had to go to Ljubljana at least two to three times a week: »In his opinion, there were several trucks’ worth of these vehicles [at the location].«
Diaden’s registered address was in Brežice, but only for receiving mail, which Aleš showed to Đurić, »who told him to throw it away, which seemed strange to him even back then«.
Because this worried Aleš, Đurić had »reassured him that the company would be sold after a while and everything would be fine«. This is exactly what happened and the company was ‘sold’ in a matter of months, in June 2007, to another addict.
Dragan Đurić. Photo: Police
The court convicted both of tax evasion, imposing a fine and sentencing Đurić to two years and Aleš to eight months in prison. Đurić was later also convicted by a court in Ljubljana in a separate case of attempted corporate fraud – to additional two years of prison.
Diaden was deleted from the register of companies in 2009. This was also the last year that Medico Trade, the company involved in the sale of vehicles, filed its financial statements.
When Đurić’s Seychelles-based company Medusadoo decided to open an account with Loyal Bank in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the eponymous Slovenian company Medusa was the only one still officially operating, according to available information on his companies.
In 2012, the last year Medusa submitted its business report to the Slovenian corporate registrar, the company reported a 2329-fold growth in revenue or just under 14 million euro. It also reported overall costs in almost the exact same amount.
Medusa further reported 13.1 million euro of short-term debt and about the same amount of short-term trade receivables.
After his conviction for tax evasion, Đurić left Slovenia and went to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where »he allegedly lived for a certain period of time«, according to the Supreme Court’s findings last year. As he is also a citizen of Serbia, he purportedly »actually lived there at the beginning of 2020«.
None of these countries extradite their nationals, the court explained in its ruling last year rejecting Đurić's motion to suspend the proceedings for enforcement of the custodial sentence on the grounds that the statute of limitation had conclusively expired.
Freedom in the Seychelles
After Đurić escaped from Slovenian law enforcement, Interpol was sent on his trail as well. Slovenian police confirmed to Oštro that they are still looking for him, including through international police cooperation, but, in the interests of the investigation, did not disclose details.
They stressed that »extradition of a person to Slovenia is not possible from countries that do not have bilateral extradition treaties with Slovenia«.
When the Seychelles office of AABOL learned in September 2015 that Đurić was a fugitive, all alarms went off. Their compliance officers discovered in the course of a routine customer check that he was wanted by Interpol.
AABOL employees did not hesitate, internal emails show: »We have to report him to the authorities.« That same month they sent a suspicious transaction report to the financial regulator in the Seychelles.
But by October 2015 Đurić already decided to ‘sell’ his Seychelles company. Slavko Perić, then a 66-year-old from Bosnia and Herzegovina, was to become the new beneficial owner. This took place in 2016 but it was just a formality. Perić was a straw man.
Six months later Medusadoo was still using Đurić’s Slovenian postal address and AABOL still listed Đurić as the beneficial owner of the company, which means that at least at the end of 2016 he was still the de facto controller of Medusadoo in the Seychelles
Two years later, Slovenian news site Siol reported, based on an off-the-record conversation with a criminal investigator, that Đurić had ties to Dijana Đuđić, allegedly an associate of the Slovenian Prime Minister’s adviser Rok Snežić. We have not been able to verify this independently.
We tried to contact Đurić through his lawyer Lado Arčon whom we have asked to forward questions to his client. The lawyer, however, replied that he has no knowledge of the matter »and does not otherwise comment on relationships with clients, much less on what his clients confide in him«.
AABOL told Oštro that they had complied with regulations in the case of Medusadoo. They added that the Financial Intelligence Unit of the police, to which they had sent the report on Đurić, had requested further clarifications from them: »Due to ongoing and future investigations by the competent authorities, we are unable to provide further information.«
The Seychelles Financial Intelligence Unit and the SFinancial Services Authority did not comment on the case, but the latter authority explained that all relevant intelligence they obtain is passed on to relevant institutions at home and abroad, if appropriate .
