By: Peter Truden
Robert Golob is the second candidate for the new face of the transitional left for Prime Minister, whom they are trying to sell as a successful private sector manager. The first was Zoran Janković.
For the first one, we already know that the story of his mythological business vein burst like a soap bubble when all of Mercator’s Balkan investments ran aground and we saw that the later Ljubljana sheriff as a businessman basically invested at a guess, without serious business analysis or even worse – based on some motives completely unrelated to the business world. What about Golob?
Golob’s business career
GEN-I, which he hegemonically lead, has been presented as a global success story for years. If we want to get to know Robert Golob as a businessman, and not as a political outcast of Zoran Janković, which is still evident today, we must immerse ourselves in his business career.
Until five minutes ago, no one knew who Robert Golob was. Those who are intensely leisurely or professionally involved in politics remembered him as a long-haired energy gentleman who more than a decade ago praised and defended his then party boss Janković when he was drowning in corruption scandals. Newly, he was reborn as “Drnovšek’s miracle boy of energy” when his term at the top of the state semi-monopolist GEN-I, which he assumed would last forever, was not extended. The myth of the prodigy boy is partly the result of self-promotion, partly the work of the “research institutes” of the Slovenian left-wing agitprop.
A man with a past
Golob did not start as Slovenian Steve Jobs from his mother’s garage, but he climbed the folklore Slovenian path to success – he joined the state energy 23 years ago as the state secretary for energy at the Ministry of the Economy in Drnovšek’s government. Of course, he did not come as a parachutist without a past – he is the son of the already established communist director Valentin Golob, who ran the Soča power plants in the SFRY since 1976. He left politics without visible success and set out on the path of renewable resources with his private company Strela G. With it he is still explaining fairy tales to the uneducated about the rules of nature of insolating the whole country. As a private individual, he did not achieve any visible success. He got lucky when his company Strela G was recapitalised in 2002 and bought by the then mighty Istrabenz, which later operated in partnership with Gorenje. The state-owned company Gen energija, which owned part of the Krško Nuclear Power Plant, then bought half of Istrabenz Gorenje’s share – thus GEN-I was born, which had already begun with the competitive advantage of affordable electricity from nuclear energy, which greatly increased the company’s revenues. Golob was only a passenger and an observer in these affairs, like a pebble on the beach carried here and there. Coincidentally, he found himself on the right side of the beach. Thus, the genius entrepreneur Golob was just a real LDS man in the right place that managed to sell his stagnant company to a state conglomerate. He then turned part of the company that marketed electricity with the help of nuclear energy from Krško into a success story. Golob is thus – literally – an entrepreneur on nuclear-powered reactor and evaporator that we all paid for, and in public, he dreams of windmills and solar power plants like some man’s hairier version of Greta Thunberg
Golob as boss
The majority media has taught us so far that Golob is a genius businessman at the level of the guys who created Silicon Valley. But how did he run companies? Let us leave aside the fact that his primary company, regarding industries and global comparison, has very modest profit margins, even though it is engaged almost exclusively in the resale of electricity. So, in a similar way as Tesla deals with the resale of release vouchers. That is, it is parasitising on the global green movement personified by Greta Thunberg. What was Robert Golob like as a boss – as a director of a large system of state-owned companies? What were his habits? What was he doing after drinking his morning coffee and leafing through the newspapers?
Affair in Bosnia and Herzegovina
The affair about Golob’s Bosnian adventure, which has long been forgotten by the Slovenian media, gives some hints.
Robert Golob once had a desire to create a big business with power plants in the Balkans – especially in Bosnia. To break into the market, he used the structure of Slovenian companies, which in Slovenia helped his company save losses and turn it into success through acquisitions. The Bosnian company Intrade energija was involved in the deal. At that time, that company was a 51% owner of the Slovenian company Istrabenz slovenski inženiring, Ltd, and Robert Golob was its director. The company Istrabenz slovenski inženiring was owned by the company IGES, or even earlier Istrabenz Gorenje (director again Robert Golob), which was supported by the state-owned Istrabenz and Petrol. Istrabenz slovenski inženiring was a social shell dedicated to the Bosnian subsidiary Intrade energija. In 2010, the Istrabenz Investment Engineering was without operating revenues, it only had financial revenues from the operation of its Bosnian subsidiary.
Bosnian media reveal
The company was engaged in the production of electricity in four hydroelectric power plants on the Neretva River, which is not disputable, but the story quickly began to get complicated in a Balkan style. Nobody knew exactly how the Slovenian partners in Bosnia got the deal. At the time, the Bosnian media wrote a lot about corruption at the state level and the impoverishment of taxpayers. In Bosnia, it has long been hidden who the real owner of Intrade energija is. Nihad Spahalić, who was Robert Golob’s business partner at the time (both were on the company’s supervisory board), falsely presented himself as the owner for some time. The real ownership was only discovered over time by the Bosnian media. At the time, the company was vying for a big deal to build Bosnian hydropower plants. For Golob’s company Intrade energija to get the deal, the then Bosnian Minister of Industry Vahid Hećo lobbied and wanted to offer them a concession for the construction of eight large hydroelectric power plants, about which the Bosnian media wrote a lot and speculated that it was an internal agreement between Golob and the minister or other government representatives.
Suspicions of corruption
However, their plans were ruined by foreign owners, who, of course, did not know about the alleged agreement between Hećo and Golob and submitted their offers. Therefore, a public tender was necessary. Despite better foreign competition, Intrade Energija managed to obtain a concession to build smaller hydroelectric power plants on the Neretva River. However, there are well-founded suspicions that the case involved corruption or at least exploitation of political alliances in the Bosnian government leadership. This was all the clearer when a video of poorer quality appeared in the public, published by the Sarajevo daily Dnevni Avaz, showing a conversation between Nihad Spahalić, then director of Intrade energija, and Safet Oručević, former MP and mayor of Mostar and then lobbyist of Austrian companies that wanted to penetrate the Bosnian market. In the part where Intrade energija is mentioned, there is talk of building two hydroelectric power plants on the Neretva River, for which Spahalić has been trying to obtain a concession with a self-initiated offer for more than five years.
Affair 15 percent
Oručević and Spahalić had supposedly draw up a strategy on how to obtain the consent of the concessions commission with the help of the former president of Bosnia and Herzegovina Haris Silajdžić, and then sell the concessions for a substantial profit. In this part of the conversation, Spahalić and Oručević discussed the share that the Slovenian partner, Istrabenz, should maintain in the entire business. In the conversation, Spahalić notes that Istrabenz can have a maximum share of 15% in the company that invests in the construction of the hydroelectric power plant. He said the following when he also mentioned Golob: “… because, as you know, the bearer of this project (power plant) is my friend Robert Golob, you know, that doctor who served as a liaison. I told Robert, please do it for me, accept 15 percent, and I will introduce you, Robert Golob, in my company, no, not to mine – to Intrade. You are my good friend, fuck, we are going to fight in the PM together. And that was then so agreed. That is why 15 percent was needed because of this basis.”
Disclosure of ownership
After the revelations of the real ownership of the company Intrade energija and the strange deals with the concession, the Bosnian media attacked the representative Spahalić and the director Robert Golob. They wondered how BiH could allow Slovenian concessions in state-regulated energy, and which Bosnian politicians had been bribed to do so. In the answers that Spahalić offered to journalists, it also becomes clear why he spoke about the maximum 15% presence of Slovenian capital in the Neretva hydroelectric power plant project. Since 2006, Spahalić has been explaining to the public that Istrabenz Slovenski inženiring or Intrade energija will cede its concession to a new company in which it would retain a maximum of a symbolic percentage. He later changed the story and claimed that the share of Slovenian companies in the Neretva hydroelectric power plant project would not exceed 30 percent.
An undesirable person in BiH
In the end, the only investor in Bosnian hydropower plants, over which a strong shadow of corruption hung, was still the company Intrade energija or through it, Robert Golob’s Istrabenz slovenski inženiring. Golob is still considered an undesirable person in Bosnia today, as the Bosnian media have recognised suspicions of corruption and harm to Bosnian citizens in the Intrada energija business.
Follow the mentor
So, what does this typical Balkan episode of intrigue and suspicion of corruption in big energy deals tell us about Golob? It is more than obvious that Robert Golob is following his mentor Janković in this respect as well, who liked to expand his foggy business into the anarchy of the Balkans. In countries where there is a parallel economy and everything can be arranged through acquaintances in local and state politics, it is much easier to do business where a million or two disappear at the expense of taxpayers.
On the other hand, Golob’s behaviour in the last few months since he learned that he will no longer be the director of the company he already owned has become completely neurotic, nothing in line with a shady businessman from the shadows who exploits Balkan misery for personal gain.
Events in GEN-I
Even as a director, Golob claimed without any evidence that there was a huge interest in GEN-I’s half share in Gen EL and that they had received an offer from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, i.e., to privatise the company. This offer never materialised, no one confirmed it, there are many chances that it never existed. Even when he was director, he was a typical politician. It was pure self-promotion as when he said he had offers from abroad for a million euros, but he never said in which company. Overnight, the cunning businessman turned into a teenager who wants to brag in front of his classmates about how many girls he has already spent the night with. Namely, he was severely affected by the realisation that directorships in state-owned companies are not eternal.
Reincarnation of Zoran Janković
So, who is Robert Golob? Slovenian Steve Jobs? Luka Dončić of Slovenian politics? No. Once again, we will get the reincarnation of Zoran Janković – an arrogant, self-centered, narrow-minded, impatient representative of the transitional left, who in his bubble over the years began to believe his own delusion that he has no match in the country and in the world. They could not be more alike – both politically minded, but they deny it. Both with controversial deals in the Balkans, both are squabbling over personal income, and both consider themselves top businessmen, even though they ran state-owned companies, with globally comparable poor business results. Is Slovenia ready for the new Janković?
Affair 15 percent, great panic
On Saturday, Planet TV presented to the public a clip from 2009, which appeared for a short time on the website of the newspaper Dnevni avaz, and then disappeared from servers for more than a decade. There was talk of the division of commissions or ownership shares in the project of building hydroelectric power plants on the Neretva River, worth 300 million euros.
Planet TV announced the evening broadcast, now known as the Affair of 15 Percent, during the day, after which there were reactions in the media under the auspices of the garbage and media tycoon Martin Odlazek. Reporter was surprising as it allegedly told an exclusive story, “how foreign intelligence services were involved in the SDS in order to discredit Robert Golob”. At the same time, they completely “ignored” the fact that in Slovenia the weekly Reporter was the only one to draw attention to the recording and content in 2011. It is true, however, that the Reporter was not yet owned by Odlazek in 2011.
Golob’s Gibanje Svoboda party panicked, rushing to explain and post videos on social media in which Robert Golob claimed he had never had a bank account abroad in his life, nor had he ever had a company abroad. There is no talk about that yet. He also denied ever receiving a commission or bribe. More importantly, however, the affair was not reported by any of the major media outlets over the weekend and at the beginning of it.