Word: abdication
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, had issued up to $500 million in worthless IOUs to 63 Yugoslav banks and other enterprises. The revelations forced the country's Vice President, Hamdija Pozderac, to resign after the Belgrade newspaper Borba and other publications linked him to the scandal. Agrokomerc Chief Executive Fikret Abdic is in jail awaiting trial. At least six top Communist officials in Bosnia-Herzegovina resigned from their posts or were expelled from the party as a result of the scandal, along with dozens of lower-ranking figures. The ousters represented one of the few instances in which the press...
Agrokomerc, like most industrial enterprises in Yugoslavia, was in effect the personal fiefdom of the local Communist Party chief. In this case the boss was Fikret Abdic, 48, one of the most influential figures in the northwestern republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the firm's chief executive since 1967. Stout and graying, Abdic ruled Agrokomerc in imperial style, often issuing $ directives from a villa on the Adriatic coast, to which he commuted, attended by secretaries and bodyguards, in a customized...
Under the hard-driving Abdic, Agrokomerc grew from a tiny milk-processing plant to a conglomerate with 13,500 employees, 1985 sales of $183 million, and products ranging from chicken parts to frozen dough. The rapid expansion transformed the firm's hometown, Velika Kladusa, from an impoverished peasant village to a prosperous community of whitewashed brick homes. But it turned out that Abdic had financed much of the expansion through a type of fraud that has become common in Yugoslavia's byzantine financial system...
...swindle was the power that local Communist chiefs have over regional banks. According to Yugoslav press accounts, Abdic pressured the local branch of Privredna Banka, the Bosnian central bank, into providing guarantees for a steady flow of unsecured promissory notes issued by Agrokomerc. The guarantees made it possible for Agrokomerc to sell the notes for cash to other banks. Abdic plowed the proceeds into his ambitious development plans for the company and lavish community projects for Velika Kladusa, including an Olympic-size swimming pool...
...unravel last January when, following a warehouse fire, police discovered falsified bank orders in Agrokomerc's records. Newspapers, relying on government leaks, began running stories on the scandal in August. Earlier this month the entire governing boards of both Agrokomerc and the Privredna Banka branch were fired, while Abdic and seven others were jailed on charges of "counterrevolutionary activities." Following demands for a purge of the Bosnian hierarchy from Communist leaders in Belgrade, the capital, 50 functionaries were expelled from the republic's party organization...