THE FILES on a police probe into a complaint made by a private individual have gone missing, a witness told the court in the case of Predrag Djordjevic vs the Popular Bank yesterday.
Djordjevic, a Serbian businessman based in Nicosia, is suing the bank for compensation and damages in a 900,000 Deutschmark transaction that was never completed.
The businessman had a licence issued on humanitarian grounds by the United Nations that allowed him to sell cotton for making medical products to a Serbian company while sanctions were in force against Yugoslavia.
To facilitate payment, Djordjevic opened an account at Beogradska Banka in Nicosia in the name of Genemp, his trading company. But instead of receiving the full amount from Belgrade directly, Genemp was credited with just DM537,000, which had been transferred from the Popular Bank account of Antexol – an offshore company in Cyprus.
Djordjevic is claiming the remaining DM360,000 plus damages from Popular Bank. He believes this amount was also credited to Antexol’s account at Popular Bank, but was used for other purposes.
The Popular Bank accepted Antexol made the DM537,000 payment, but claimed it had no knowledge of the DM900,000 transaction.
Antexol and several other Serbian-owned offshore companies have been named by The Hague tribunal as fronts for sanctions-busting by the government of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president.
Many of these were registered as “trading corporations” by the Tassos Papadopoulos law firm. Antexol was struck off the company registrar’s record in August 2003.
Djordjevic’s case is built on the premise that the Popular Bank, Beogradska and Antexol were bedfellows in an alleged money-laundering conspiracy, in which his own company was inadvertently sucked in.
According to an investigation by the United Nations war crimes tribunal at The Hague, the money-laundering funds were used to buy weapons, equipment and fuel for the Milosevic regime to pursue wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.
At a previous hearing, a former Serbian bank treasurer had testified how millions of pounds in cash were jammed in plastic bags and then flown from Yugoslavia to Cyprus
In 1998, Djordjevic filed a complaint with the Financial Crime Unit, asking them to investigate where his missing money was.
To this day, he says, he has received no word as to the fate of the police probe.
Yesterday’s witness Christiana Xenopoulou, who worked at the unit at the time – she is no longer with the police force – told the court that she had recently requested the file on the investigation for the purposes of the trial, only to be informed that the file “could not be found”.
“I don’t know…I was told it’s not there,” she said.
Xenopoulou, a witness for the defence, said, however, that to the best of her recollection the case was dropped or closed because police had decided there were no grounds to pursue it.
“We carried out an audit trail and, based on our investigations, the answers given to us corresponded to the questions and made sense.”
Cross-examined by Djordjevic’s lawyers, Xenopoulou conceded that she was not familiar with or could not recall the substance of the case. Her role was to take written testimonies from the parties concerned.
She said her boss at the unit then was Charalambos Koulentis, currently the Chief of Police.
Some of the people interviewed back then included Pambos Ioannides, a top lawyer from President Tassos Papadopoulos’ law offices and director of Antexol Trade Ltd from 1992 to 1995, and Slobodan Acimovic Assistant Director of Beogradska Banka.
Acimovic’s name appeared on a blacklist issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the US Treasury.
Sparks flew at a previous hearing, when the Popular Bank’s lawyer submitted that Acimovic had issued instructions to revoke the wire transfer of 900,000 DEM to Antexol. Djordjevic’s side strenuously objected, saying that a copy of the letter was not admissible evidence, only the original. The judge sustained the objection.
Djordjevic’s lawyers have debunked the suggestion that the wire transfer was revoked since, if that were the case, their client should have received the 360,000 DEM he is still owed.
