\u201cThis small river used to be abundant in brown trout,\u201d Botju pointed at the river by the road. \u201cWe caught fish with our bare hands. Now they\u2019re gone.\u201d<\/p>
In early 2019, local environmental associations organized a protest rally demanding, among other things, an investigation into how small hydropower plants pollute the environment. The local government, spearheaded by Bosilegrad municipal chief Vladimir Zaharijev<\/strong>, responded with a simultaneous counterprotest \u2013 justifying the investors, who have already built four SHPPs in Bosilegrad and are currently building four more.<\/p> The municipal administration played a part in it. Between 2010 and 2013 the municipal government issued construction permits for six SHPPs \u2013 Virovci, Reka 1, Bistar, Branjovica, Tlamino<\/em> and Gradi\u0161te<\/em>.<\/p> Based on a memo sent by Botju, in early 2018 representatives of the Institute for Nature Conservation of Serbia conducted an inspection of completed and SHPPs under construction and established that the aforementioned SHPPs lacked the required conditions for nature conservation.<\/p> The municipal officials claim that according to regulations applicable at the time, the construction of hydropower plants did not require conditions for nature conservation, because they were an integral part of the reference conditions issued by the Republic Water Directorate, reads a reply delivered to CINS.<\/p> However, after the Institute\u2019s tour, the Ministry of Environmental Protection inspectorate conducted surveillance and in November that same year addressed the Ministry of Construction, Transportation and Infrastructure, claiming that the construction permits obtained were in contravention of the Environmental Protection Law. At the start of January, the Ministry replied to journalists that the reports submitted by the Ministry of Environmental Protection were being processed.<\/p> The ministries did not answer the journalists\u2019 question, about whether the conditions for environmental protection were necessary at the time of issue of the construction permits.<\/p> The Institute identified other irregularities as well. While on some SHPPs fish ladders, which are to enable the free passage of fish, are closed by wooden bulkheads, the greenery by the riverside was removed during the construction of one hydropower plant.<\/p> \u201cRiverbank degradation affects the entire ecosystem,\u201d Jelena \u010canak Atlagi\u0107<\/strong>, a researcher at the Institute for Biological Research, told CINS. She added that partitioning fish ladders obstructed the natural movement, feeding and reproduction of fish species.<\/p> \u201cThe destruction of habitats may cause a potential disappearance of fish species that are important to the local community for tourism and recreational or sport fishing, and that can produce economic consequences \u2013 less fishing tourism, less money,\u201d Atlagi\u0107 explained.<\/p> Away from the populated areas, the SHPPs of Bosilegrad, one of the poorest municipalities in the south of the country, are located one next to the other, leaving a long line of plastic pipes along the river. One of them, perhaps the most beautiful of all, SHPP Virovci<\/em>, is located close to the Jare\u0161nik nature reserve, a rare black pine subspecies forest on Mt. Dukat. The license for its construction was among those disputed by the Ministry of Environmental Protection inspectorate.<\/p> <\/p> Virovci<\/em> was built by the VS Energy<\/em> company in 2015, which was founded by Slavko Pandrc<\/strong> in Vrnja\u010dka Banja, a town in central Serbia.<\/p> In an interview with a CINS journalist, Pandrc claimed that the Institute\u2019s reference conditions had not been required at the time of issue of the controversial construction permit.<\/p> Asked why he hadn\u2019t objected to the inspectors\u2019 minutes when he\u2019d had the chance, Pandrc replied that he had not wanted to engage in correspondence and that all the documents could be found at the Bosilegrad municipal administration headquarters.<\/p> When founding the company, Slavko Pandrc made another decision \u2013 to introduce his son, Milo\u0161 Pandrc<\/strong>, a former member of Darko \u0160ari\u0107\u2019s gang, to the new, growing business in Serbia. In December 2018 Darko \u0160ari\u0107<\/strong> was convicted by the court of first instance of international smuggling nearly six tons of cocaine.<\/p> Milo\u0161 was charged, together with his brother Marko<\/strong>, with having taken part in cocaine smuggling in South America in 2008 and 2009, as part of an organized crime group.<\/p> One of the group\u2019s plans had been to transport more than two tons of cocaine, packed in rubber balloons and placed into bags, to Uruguay and then to Europe on a large ship. However, what the members of this criminal group did not know was that U.S. and Serbian services had had their eye on them the whole time. On the night of October 15, in the port of Santa Lucia near Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, police stormed the ship loaded with cocaine.<\/p> It would soon turn out that this event was just a part of a broader operation dubbed Balkan Warrior, aimed at stopping a group that smuggled drugs, which comprised Serbian and Montenegrin nationals headed by Darko \u0160ari\u0107.<\/p> As a member of this group, Milo\u0161 Pandrc was arrested not long after the drug raid in Uruguay. Three years later, in 2012, he made a plea bargain with the prosecution and pleaded guilty. On those grounds he was sentenced to ten years and six months in prison, and his car and two apartments in Belgrade were seized.<\/p> Years passed and Pandrc might have been forgotten in a sea of affairs and street clashes between criminals occurring on an almost daily basis, if he hadn\u2019t decided to enter the small HPP business in 2015.<\/p> Milo\u0161 was appointed as one of the directors of VS Energy<\/em> in 2015, regardless of the fact that he was still serving his prison sentence at the time. He was released from prison a year later, based on a decision by the Higher Court allowing him release on parole.<\/p> Slavko told CINS that he had appointed Milo\u0161 as director because he was his son and that he planned to leave the entire business to his heir, who \u2013 despite officially not being in the company anymore \u2013 still manages the business.<\/p> Milo\u0161 left the company after a year of the SHPP\u2019s operation, and its head office was transferred to the Novi Beograd, a district of Belgrade. CINS journalists failed to establish contact with him before the publication of the article.<\/p> In 2017, when it officially began generating electricity, SHPP Virovci<\/em> brought the Pandrc family just under three million dinars of state budget funds.<\/p> CINS reported earlier <\/a>that the bulk of the money for the purchase of electricity from small hydropower plants had in the past few years been paid to the Electric Power Industry of Serbia (EPS) and to companies connected with Aleksandar Vucic\u2019s best man Nikola Petrovic.<\/p> The documents gathered by CINS reveal that the land and construction permit for building the Virovci<\/em> hydropower plant were purchased from the Pure Energy 2012<\/em> company, the ownership of which is linked to Ljubi\u0161a Buha a.k.a. \u010cume<\/strong>, the former head of a gang in a Belgrade suburb \u2013 Sur\u010din gang<\/em>.<\/p> Slavko Pandrc says he got land and the permit as compensation, because Pure Energy 2012<\/em> owed him money for the construction of the Gradi\u0161te<\/em> SHHP, built by his company Pandrc-Komerc<\/em>.<\/p> \u201cBetter some repayment from a debtor than none. What was I supposed to do, not take that either and then I would neither have my cake nor eat it? We do compensation, that\u2019s the whole point. I wouldn\u2019t have gone into it if it hadn\u2019t been for their debt to me,\u201d he explained.<\/p> Ljubi\u0161a Buha is also known as the first witness collaborator in the proceedings for the assassination of Serbian Prime Minister Zoran \u0110in\u0111i\u0107<\/strong>, and in the trials of Zemun, another Belgrade district, gang members. Buha has been in prison since 2015 for threatening and assaulting his ex-wife Ivana Tulovi\u0107\u2019s<\/strong> bodyguards, jeopardizing the safety of a police officer on her security detail, as well as for obstructing the investigation in that case. In late 2017 he was sentenced to another 16 months in prison and fined for threatening the prosecutor who had been leading a counterfeiting case against him.<\/p> Although Buha\u2019s affairs were widely covered, he did not appear in those companies personally. One of them is the Banja Luka-based Lein<\/em> company. Banja Luka is the second largest city in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the capital of its Republika Srpska entity.<\/p> The official owners of Lein<\/em> are \u017deljko Lalu\u0161i\u0107<\/strong> and Buha\u2019s attorney Du\u0161an Vasovi\u0107<\/strong>. Vasovi\u0107 is known in Serbia for having privatized the Valjevo Road Company<\/em> in 2005, where Buha is also suspected to be the actual owner. Ivana Tulovi\u0107 publicly said on several occasions that the companies in question had been controlled by her husband \u2013 the last such occasion was in 2017, when Lein<\/em> bought the Srebrenica Bauxite Mine<\/em> in Republika Srpska.<\/p> Du\u0161an Vasovi\u0107 said he was unable to talk with CINS journalists due to private issues.<\/p> Through co-ownership of Pure Energy 2012<\/em>, Lein<\/em> sold the Pandrc family the land and construction permit for the construction of SHPP Virovci<\/em> in 2015. That was done through the sale of Virovci<\/em> to Pandrc\u2019s VS Energy<\/em> in 2015. The contract CINS gained access to does not show the value of the deal, rather only that it will be defined by a separate document, and may also be settled through debt offsetting.<\/p> However, the sale of Virovci<\/em> was not the only time Lein<\/em> made a profit in the area of small HPPs.<\/p> In Bosilegrad, Lein<\/em> and its business partners at one point held permits and land for the construction of SHPPs at 24 locations.<\/p> As of 2010, the majority of locations were owned by the Best Energy System<\/em> 2010 company, headed by CEO Nenad Novakovi\u0107<\/strong>, while in the following years Lein<\/em> and other foreign companies acquired stakes in the company. In 2003 Novakovi\u0107 led a consortium that purchased, in privatization procedure, the Ni\u0161 Road Construction Company<\/em>, having beaten \u010cume\u2019s Defence Road company at an auction. Besides Novakovi\u0107, the consortium also comprised businessman Milo \u0110ura\u0161kovi\u0107<\/strong>, who was later charged with tax evasion along with Miroslav Mi\u0161kovi\u0107<\/strong>, a businessman considered to be one of Serbia\u2019s richest.<\/p> One of the locations is the site of SHPP Gradi\u0161te<\/em>, which Pandrc built, and which received more than 100 million dinars from the state budget between 2014 and 2017, for the produced electricity. Lein<\/em> had been one of the owners of this hydropower plant until last year.<\/p> <\/p> <\/p> Milo\u0161 Pandrc, convicted of drug smuggling as a member of Darko \u0160ari\u0107\u2019s gang, was appointed \u2013 while in prison \u2013 as a representative of the company that built the Virovci hydropower plant. The company bought location and certain permits for the plant from a firm linked to another ex-gang leader. Virovci is one of the six plants which, according to the Ministry of Environmental Protection, obtained construction permits illegally<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1123,"featured_media":15970,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1582,1492,1580],"tags":[1638,1648,1647],"class_list":["post-19638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cross-border-crime","category-investigative-stories","category-small-hydropower-plants","tag-power-plant","tag-shpp","tag-small-hydropower-plants","ciTrackContent"],"acf":[],"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/www.cins.rs\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/1551116190~~Virovci.jpg","author_additional":[1119],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cins.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cins.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cins.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cins.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cins.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19638"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.cins.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22709,"href":"https:\/\/www.cins.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19638\/revisions\/22709"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cins.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cins.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cins.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cins.rs\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
From Prison into Business<\/h2>Small hydropower plant near Bosilegrad<\/h2>
![\"Small](\"\/\/www.cins.rs\/uploads\/news\/Enterfile\/Slike\/big_1551118864~~IMG_9098-(1).jpg\")
<\/a>Photo: CINS<\/h3><\/div>
Connections with ex-gang leader<\/h2>Ljubi\u0161a Buha \u010cume<\/h2>
<\/a>Photo: Vreme Weekly \/ Aleksandar Stankovi\u0107<\/h3><\/div>
The text was created with the support of WWF Adria<\/a>. The content of the text is sole responsibility of the author and does not necessarily reflect positions of WWF Adria.
From November 2018 to September 2019 the work of CINS is supported by Sweden, within the Belgrade Open School program “Civil Society as a Force for a Change in the Serbia’s EU Accession Process.<\/a>“
<\/em><\/h6><\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"