Todorić refuses to go down without a fight, and now one of Serbia's most famous lawyers has been engaged by the former Agrokor boss to help.
For a man who claims to have no money, the ever-shrewd Ivica Todorić isn't doing too badly. Miraculously managing to pay the British authorities £100,000 in bail money, living in a very rich quarter of London (and, let's face it, none are cheap), and hiring expensive lawyers to fight his corner, none of these are really actions of a man keeping his eye on every kuna, or in this case, every pound.
Despite all of that, Todorić continues to firmly insist that he doesn't have large sums of money in his possession, let alone the barely comprehensible amounts he is accused of misappropriating from Agrokor.
There were rumours several months ago that he had even hired the formidable British lawyer Michael O'Kane, who is known for trying his hand in even the most complicated of cases, including those that involve the likes of the Russian mafia, to try to help him in his fight against extradition, but later claimed that this, too, of course, was a spin used against him.
If this too fails, will Todorić claim his hiring of a top Serbian lawyer, Zdenko Tomanović, to be a spin too? Probably.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 11th of August, 2018, Tomanović has roughly stated that even though the Croatian state didn't actually have even one percent of ownership in Agrokor, it has passed a law [Lex Agrokor] that, over the time that followed, saw its owner, Ivica Todorić, left unable to run his firm.
One of Serbia's most formidable lawyers, Zdenko Tomanović, whose office is now representing Ivica Todorić in front of the international institutions lined up against him, gave an interview to Nedeljnik, a weekly magazine published in the Serbian capital of Belgrade.
"Yes, Ivica Todorić has hired our office, but not for his defense in Croatia because we don't have the right to defense there, but for legal aid issues in front of international institutions and arbitrations. In Serbia, parliament voted to see whether there was tax evasion going on with Mišković (top Serbian businessman), and [in contrast] the Croatian Government didn't even have one percent of ownership in Agrokor, yet a law was passed that saw the owner of Agrokor, Todorić, left unable to manage his own firm. This isn't allowed, nor is the scavenger-like relationship with Agrokor, and this will be discussed over the next few years with international institutions, but it's too early to talk about it in detail,'' Tomanović told Nedeljnik.
