Podgorica Court Also Blocks Sale of Vijesti Newspaper
Montenegro's Commercial Court has halted the transfer of a majority stake in Vijesti's publisher, a month after doing the same for Television Vijesti. Minority owners say Vucic is behind the sale.
On August 27, Montenegro’s Commercial Court issued an interim injunction blocking the change of ownership at Daily Press, the publisher of the Vijesti newspaper and website, and banned the extraordinary shareholders’ meeting scheduled for September 9. The ruling lands as Vijesti’s minority owners publicly claim the sale is tied to a deal with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, whom they accuse of wanting to take over the last independent media outlets in the region, Vijesti included, which makes the dispute before the Podgorica court directly relevant to the Serbian public as well.
The Daily Press ruling, signed by Judge Marija Adzic, is not the first of its kind. On August 12, the same court, in a decision by Judge Milica Saveljic, had already halted a change in the ownership and management structure of Television Vijesti, likewise banning an extraordinary meeting scheduled for the same date, September 9, and barring any orders to the broadcaster’s governing bodies related to the ownership change. The two rulings, a month apart, concern the same transaction as it plays out across two different companies within the same publishing group.
What the court considers disputed
At the center of the dispute is United Media’s plan to transfer its 51 percent stake to an affiliated company, Adria News, without first offering it to the other owners. The minority shareholders, Vijesti’s founders and the Media Development Investment Fund, who together hold about 49 percent, argue that such a transfer would sidestep their right of first refusal, since United Grupa has already announced the sale of Adria News to the Portuguese fund Alpac Capital. That fund’s owner, Pedro Vargas David, has asked Montenegro’s Agency for Protection of Competition for approval to take a majority stake in both Television Vijesti and Daily Press.
A legal expert who explained the dispute to Vijesti used a real estate comparison:
“Imagine you co-own a house with someone else. You’ve agreed that if that person ever wants to sell their share, you get the first right to buy it. Instead, that person decides to first ‘gift’ their share to a brother, so that the brother can turn around and sell that half of the house to a stranger the next day, without anyone asking you a thing.”
The minority owners’ response
Zeljko Ivanovic, chairman of Vijesti’s board of directors and one of the paper’s founders, spoke out after the first ruling, the one covering Television Vijesti.
“It matters a great deal to us that the court took the position that the minority shareholders made it plausible that appointing Brent Sadler as the authorized representative before the Agency for Audiovisual Media Services could violate the minority shareholders’ rights, including our right of first refusal,” Ivanovic said.
Ivanovic added that the 2022 sale of part of United Media’s shares rests on a special legal arrangement that gives minority shareholders decisive say over the appointment of management and editorial staff, alongside the right of first refusal mentioned above. He described Montenegro as a country on the path to the European Union, where, in his words, institutions do their job independently of politics.
What happens next
Whether the right of first refusal was actually violated will ultimately be settled by arbitration, and United Media has the right to appeal both interim measures before a panel of the Commercial Court. Until that process concludes, the shareholders’ meetings of both Daily Press and Television Vijesti stay frozen, and with them any further change in the ownership structure of one of the last independent media systems in Montenegro.
