Dana Holdings, a Cyprus-based entity, evaded EU penalties because of a bureaucratic mix-up
An attempt by the European Union to place sanctions on Serbia's Karić family, due to their connections with Belarus's autocratic president, ultimately backfired, as the wrong corporate information was listed, a probe by the Belarusian Investigative Center (BIC) has revealed.
OCCRP and BIC documented in 2021 how the Karić family exploited their bond with Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko to secure property development and construction deals valued at over $1 billion.
Reporters from BIC and KRIK, OCCRP’s affiliate centers in Belarus and Serbia, also discovered at that time that the family managed to sidestep the EU’s limitations by shifting assets from Belarus to a corporation in the United Arab Emirates.
In a more recent inquiry, BIC elaborates on the specific procedural mistake that enabled the Karić family to effectively dodge EU sanctions.
When the EU aimed at their Cyprus-based organization, Dana Holdings, back in 2020 for supposedly “profiting from and backing” Lukashenko, the list of sanctions erroneously omitted the Cyprus corporation’s registration number.
Instead, it mistakenly included the registration number of one of the company’s branches in Belarus, Dana Astra. This error permitted Dana Astra in February 2021 to employ a deceptive parent company called Dana Holdings – identical in name to its Cyprus-based parent firm, but registered in Belarus.
The ruse was successful. When the EU sought to rectify the Dana Holdings listing in a March 2022 amendment, the bloc seems to have unintentionally utilized the corporate registration number of the novel Belarus-based business, instead of the original Cyprus entity.
In spite of this inconsistency, the EU maintains that sanctions were imposed on both Dana Astra and the Cypriot Dana Holdings.
“Our stance is that both entities have been on the list since December 2020,” stated Anitta Hipper, a spokesperson for EU foreign policy and security matters, via email.
However, the actual entity that supervised all of the Karić family’s real estate development ventures in Belarus – Dana Holdings Limited, registered in Cyprus – was never subjected to European restrictions, BIC reported. Drawing from financial reports published by Cyprus-registered Dana Holdings Limited between 2013 and 2020, BIC approximates that the company accumulated 128 million euros (approximately $143 million) in dividends from 2013 to 2020. The Cyprus corporation has since been liquidated.
Bogoljub Karić, a co-founder of the family enterprise, who is likewise under EU sanctions due to his affiliation with the Belarusian government, did not respond to requests seeking his comments. Journalists directed inquiries to a LinkedIn profile bearing the name Dana Holdings, but received no response.
By the time US sanctioned Cyprus-based Dana Holdings in August 2021, the entity had efficiently secured critical assets by relocating them to the United Arab Emirates.
Merely two weeks before the EU sanctions took effect in December 2020, five Cypriot offshoots of Dana Holdings Limited were transferred to a business in the UAE.
As Brussels was sanctioning an empty framework in Minsk, the crux of Dana’s financial network was safely moved offshore.
