KRIK: Serbian President’s Son Again in Company of Mafia Suspects

News

Following a tip from a reader, a reporter from OCCRP’s Serbian partner KRIK managed on Wednesday evening to take a photo of the son of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić in company with organized crime figures, adding proof to previous allegations about Danilo Vučić’s connections with the underworld.

June 11, 2020

Bojana Pavlović found Vučić junior in a Belgrade café watching a soccer game together with several people, including Aleksandar Vidojević, a member of a hooligan fan club of Belgrade’s Football Club Partizan -- the Janissaries.

Vidojević, nicknamed Aca Rošavi (Aca the Pockmarked), is registered in Serbia’s police files as a member of Kavači clan, one of two Montenegrin mafia groups OCCRP, KRIK and MANS reported about in May. He is currently on trial for demolishing a nightclub in Belgrade together with other hooligans.

Pavlović said that soon after she took a photo of the group through the window of the café “Piazza dei Fiori,” three men intercepted her and said they were police officers. After she showed them her press accreditation, they asked her to erase the photos but she had already sent them to other people.

They told her she will have to go to the police station but then two other men approached her and one of them took her phone without the alleged policemen having tried to prevent him.

Finally Vidojević and another member of the Janissaries approached them and told the men to give Pavlović her phone back, adding that KRIK’s reporting is jeopardizing his life.

Danilo Vučić and Aca Vidojević have been seen together in public four times now, according to KRIK. It is unclear what the president’s son is doing in company of a person accused of hooliganism and linked to one of Montenegro’s two mafia clans.

OCCRP/KRIK/MANS mentioned in May Vučić’s son in only one section of their extensive investigation, but that sparked uproar among Serbian officials, who accused journalists of targeting the president’s son on behalf of the opposition.

Following such reactions to the investigation that was followed by threats to KRIK’s journalists, the Council of Europe warned that KRIK “is facing a public smear campaign from the Serbian state.”