UNS info

01. 04. 2019.

???source???: UNS

Ćosić and Janjić were threatened by the man who had sold the company to the N1 owner

Bogoljub Pješčić who was questioned by the police for threats to the program director of N1 television Jugoslav Ćosić and editor in chief of the Beta agency Dagan Janjić, had been the owner of “Absolut OK” internet provider, which had been sold to an investment fund behind which had been the owner of SBB, “United Group” and N1 television Dragan Šolak, the Journalists’ Association of Serbia (UNS) finds out.

On 15 March Pješčić called Jugoslav Ćosić and according to the N1 allegations, introducing himself as an employee of the American Embassy, protested because of that television’s reporting on massacres in mosques in New Zealand. In his statement for UNS, Pješčić claims that he called Ćosić in order to ask him why N1 was “the only one in this planet” that conveyed the information that “nonsense were written in Cyrillic alphabet in Serbian” on the weapons and that the shooter glorified Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadžić. “I called him and asked him: Jugoslav, where did you get that information? Did you approve it as an editor?” Pješčić claims, adding that he had talked to Ćosić before that and that they had “common friends”.   

“We were socializing most actively when I was the spokesperson of the Association of Internet Providers of Yugoslavia, SRJ. You have all that on the internet. You have his texts on that subject on the internet. He attended all my press conferences. It was 2003, 2004, or I don’t know which one. I can’t remember. I know that he helped us a lot then. Media followed up the pressure Telekom had exerted on us; not just on my company, but on all companies that had dealt with internet providing”, Pješčić claims.

During 2002, Beta agency, B92 website, weekly magazines Vreme and NIN published the news, analyses and comments on conflict between Telekom and internet providers, and statements on behalf of the group of companies were given by Bogoljub Pješčić. Name of Jugoslav Ćosić cannot be found in any of those articles. 

Pješčić claims that he did not sell the company to Dragan Šolak, but data of the Commission for Protection of Competition as of 2014 show that “Absolut OK” (afterwards renamed into “Absolut solutions”) was a part of Šolak’s SBB group.

Bogoljub Pješčić did not want to confirm that he had anything to do with Facebook page “Serbia, our country” from which journalists were being insulted.

Pješčić: Why do you want to know about that? Even if I had or had not anything to do with it, that’s my private matter.

UNS: I’m just asking.

Pješčić: Take a better look at that page and it will be clear to you what this is all about and whose webpage that is/

UNS: Do you follow that webpage?

Pješčić: I do, pretty much, because of this current situation.

UNS: You do not participate in creating the contents?

Pješčić: I would not make any comments. But regarding who’s behind it, you can see that on the webpage itself. It is not a political party. It is about a media outlet. Foreign media outlet. It’s all written there. Do you want me to tell you –“BrighBart”? By the way, it is a media company of Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon. And he has such companies region wide. He had one in Great Britain because of the “Brexit”. He had one in Spain when he was overthrowing the government. He had one in the Netherlands, and then they made some kind of a deal.  

In his statement for the Journalists’ Association of Serbia, Jugoslav Ćosić denied knowing Bogoljub Pješčić. “Public Prosecutor asked for additional explanations from the police, so today (on Friday, 29 March) I also gave a statement. I have never been a friend of that man in my life, I have never talked to him; I have never even met him at least not that I remember of. He claims that we have been friend since the 1990s and I was out of Serbia during the entire period of the 1990s. And today I reiterated that he had introduced himself to me as an employee of the American Embassy. Later he tried to present this conversation as a conversation between two acquaintances, which is incorrect. I reiterated that it had been told to me in that conversation that I would have a life ban of entry to the USA, and that N1 will suffer the consequences for its reporting and that I should speak up about events in New Zealand”, Ćosić said.

Being asked did and why N1 remained silent before the public that on 17 March Pješčić gave a statement to the police upon criminal charges of his lawyers, Ćosić claims that no one informed N1 of the respective and that he, actually, found out about that statement when Pješčić published it on his Twitter.

Related to the issue that Pješčić was a co-owner of the “Absolut OK” that was sold to Dragan Šolak, Ćosić says that he got that information also once Pješčić publically revealed who he was. Being asked whether someone else from the company Pješčić had obviously been cooperating with knows him, he says: “I know nothing about it. I have become the director four years ago, and I heard of all those information later.”

Pješčić’s allegation that he had talked to him on the phone for half an hour Ćosić confirms and says that he did that because the experts advised him that one should talk as long as possible with those who send anonymous threats so that they would give themselves away. Ćosić’s lawyers filed criminal charges against a John Doe for an act of coercion and passing off. In his statement to the police as of 19 March Bogoljub Pješčić said that two days after the disputable phone call he sent “a memorandum of the State Department he had asked for as well as one book as a gift and a short letter written in hand in order to be personal, where I asked him only to consider his act of publishing my phone number and that I would never do that to him no matter how much I disagreed with him at given moment “to Ćosić.   

Ćosić said that he found out only later who had called him then. “I found out later who he was, by being called by some people who realized that they had his phone number in their phonebooks, after we had published it. And I did not publish the phone number of Bogoljub Pješčić, because I did not know at that moment who I was talking to. I published the phone number of a John Doe who threatened me and I did that upon the lawyers’ advice.”

Only a few days before conveying disputable statements and messages to the management of N1 and Beta, Bogoljub Pješčić had become a member of UNS and based on the confirmation by “Večernje Novosti” that he was working for them part time as a journalist in the internet desk. Confirmation that Pješčić is a journalist was signed by the director of “Novosti” Radomir Vidaković. UNS initiated a procedure for determining the accuracy of that confirmation. By the way, in 2014 “Novosti” published a coverage from a Masonic Temple in Belgrade and a conversation with Bogoljub Pješčić who had been introduced then as a head of a youth organization “DeMolay”.

DeMolay has 70 members in Serbia- Bogoljub Pješčić says. – We have more and more interest by the young people for acceptance in the society that enables them to be honorable men, true Serbian knights. Each member should observe seven cardinal virtues, which are as follows: love between a parent and a child, respect for holy things, decency, friendship, loyalty, purity and patriotism.