The Carousel: How a Moscow Bank Made Big Loans to its Serbian Owners

According to BIRN's findings, Vojin Lazarevic, Toplica Spasojevic and Obrad Sikimic used a system of double booking to avoid Russian Central Bank scrutiny of the fact that the bulk of the bank's loans - paid for out of deposits of the Serbian National Bank, NBS - were going to their own companies.

Euroaxis had its licence in Russia revoked in 2016, stranding 3.6 million euros of Serbian National Bank deposits in the bank. Russian authorities put its assets up for sale and in 2019 a court ordered the seizure of property belonging to Lazarevic, Spasojevic and Sikimic, as well as seven other people involved in the bank, including Jelica Kurjak, a former Serbian ambassador to Russia, and Ivan Maricic, the bank's last president. 

According to the latest figures, Euroaxis still owes clients close to 12 million euros, though it is unclear how much of that, if any, will fall on the 10 individuals, whose property - at least that which is available to Russian authorities - has yet to be formally seized.

"You're not supposed to start a bank to gather resources from the financial market and finance your own businesses," Maricic told BIRN in an exclusive interview. What the owners of Euroaxis did "is not normal from a professional aspect, nor is it allowed by law," he said, insisting that he had objected to the practice but was pressured into "breaking the law."

Veteran economic journalist Milan Culibrk, the editor of the Serbian NIN weekly, said: "It obviously wasn't a real bank, and it wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be a self-service supermarket: you go in and take as much as you need."

'Completely abnormal' lending practices

Euroaxis was originally called Wexim Bank, created during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s in order to...