The European Union’s attempt to sanction Serbia’s Karić family over their ties to the authoritarian president of Belarus ultimately failed because it listed the wrong company details, according to an investigation by the Belarusian Investigative Center (BIC).
OCCRP and BIC reported in 2021 how the Karić family used their relationship with Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko to obtain real estate development and construction contracts worth more than $1 billion.
Reporters from BIC and KRIK — OCCRPs member centers in Belarus and Serbia — also found at the time that the family was able to skirt the EU’s restrictive measures by moving assets from Belarus to a company in the United Arab Emirates.
In a recent investigation, BIC explains the precise procedural error that allowed the Karić family to effectively escape EU sanctions.
When the EU targeted their Cyprus-based firm, Dana Holdings, in 2020 for allegedly “benefitting from and supporting” Lukashenko, the sanctions list mistakenly omitted the Cyprus company’s registration number.
Instead, it incorrectly listed the registration number of one of the company’s subsidiaries in Belarus, Dana Astra. This error enabled Dana Astra in February 2021 to use a decoy parent company named Dana Holdings — the name of its Cyprus-based parent firm, but registered in Belarus.
The decoy worked. When the EU attempted to correct the listing of Dana Holdings in a March 2022 update, the bloc appears to have inadvertently used the corporate registration number of the new Belarus-based company, instead of the original Cyprus entity.
Despite that inconsistency, the EU said it considers that sanctions were applied to both Dana Astra and the Cypriot Dana Holdings.
“Our position is that both companies remain listed since December 2020,” said Anitta Hipper, a spokesperson for EU foreign affairs and security policy, in an email.
However, the real firm that oversaw all of the Karić family’s real estate development projects in Belarus — Cyprus-registered Dana Holdings Limited— was never subject to European restrictions, BIC reported. Based on financial statements published by Cyprus-registered Dana Holdings Limited between 2013 and 2020, BIC estimates that the firm received 128 million euros (about $143 million) in dividends from 2013 to 2020. The Cyprus company has since been dissolved.
Bogoljub Karić, co-founder of the family business, who is also under sanctions by the EU for his relationship with the Belarusian regime, did not respond to a request for comment. Reporters sent questions sent to a LinkedIn account named Dana Holdings, but did not receive a reply.
By the time Cyprus-based Dana Holdings was sanctioned by the U.S. in August 2021, the company had effectively insulated key assets by moving them to the United Arab Emirates.
Just two weeks before the EU sanctions were enacted in December 2020, five Cypriot subsidiaries of Dana Holdings Limited were transferred to a firm in the UAE.
While Brussels was sanctioning a hollow shell in Minsk, the core of Dana’s empire was safely shifted offshore.
