Hypo bank’s millions for investing to Serbia gone!

The former head of Raiffeisen International, Herbert Stepic, and other investors took from the Hypo Alpe Adria bank EUR 19 mil for the real estate purchase in Serbia, two thirds of which has never got there, Vienna’s Presse reports.

In 2006, the Austrian-Serbian investors operating under Cyprus company Enthusa Ltd., among which former RBI Stepic and Martin Schwedler are, took a loan of EUR 18,8 mil at Hypo Alpe Adria bank for the purchase of 145 ha of land along the Belgrade-Zagreb highway, only four kilometers far from the Belgrade airport.

Eight years later Hypo has not seen a return of a single euro, Presse points out, whose investigation in Serbia showed the investors used only a small portion of funds for land purchase.

- More precisely, only 31% went to land purchase as Serbian documents which the newspapers saw, show. They transferred the remaining two thirds of EUR 12 mil, contrary to the loan purpose, to off-shore countries for the return of the loan totaling million at Raiffeisen bank. The amount EUR 2,2 mil was transferred to the private bank account of Milos Cicmil, the owner of the Belgrade hotel Evropa wherefrom they later disappeared – Presse claims.

Hypo bank officially confirmed that the Enthus loan case has been cross-border investigated with the lawyers’ support.

Nikola Donih, the spokesman of O Hypo bank did not want to discuss the details, mentioning that he does not want to comment the current situation.

A anonymous source in Hypo bank says investigations lead to conclusion that there were transfers to off-shore and foreign accounts, Prese writes.

Apart from that, it was unofficially confirmed that Enthusa owns ot only EUR 19 mil to Hypo bank but that the debt with interest rates totals EUR 25 mil.

Stepic, in the meantime, left Enthusa and even before that he did not have a stake in that company but he had it through Cyprus-based Forceteh where he owned 50%.

The second half of Enthus was the ownership of Serbian Eki Properties, behind which there were former minister of privatization of Serbia, Aleksandar Vlahovic and Danko Djunic. Presse points out.

Prese underlines that the owners of Eki Properties are not familiar to Hypo bank only from this case but they have a stake of 50% in Euro Mall GmbH which took a loan in two-digit million amount.

With respect to Enthus, it is a weird fact, Prese points out,, that out of 145 ha of land bought in Serbia only some 70% was registered and difficult change into construction land has been in progress for two years.