Former President of the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina (SDP BiH) and former BiH Minister of Foreign Affairs Zlatko Lagumdžija bought an apartment with a storage room and a parking space in 2018, and a four-apartment building in 2022 for 1.07 million BAM. The properties are located in the Croatian town of Rovinj, one of the most beautiful towns on the Istrian peninsula.
Part of the money for the purchase of these properties Lagumdžija acquired by the sale of the valuable real estate in Sarajevo.
In September 2021, he and his wife Amina sold a weekend house with 6,060-square-meters of land to the Arab company Al-Joof from Sarajevo. The owner of this company, police general Saud Salem Shafi Alshafi from the United Arab Emirates, paid Lagumdžija BAM 1.17 million for this real estate. This property is located in the elite Sarajevo neighborhood of Poljine.
Four months later, Lagumdžija bought a 90-square-meter apartment with parking and a subterranean storage room in the center of Rovinj. The apartment is located three hundred meters from the sea.
“I’ve been vacationing in Rovinj for a long time, so I bought [property] there”, Lagumdžija briefly told CIN reporters.
He refused to say how much he paid for the new property, claiming that he took out a loan. Reporters found that Lagumdžija paid a little more than BAM 550,000 marks for these properties.
However, these are not the only properties he owns in this popular tourist town. Back in May 2018, he bought a four-apartment building, for which he paid BAM 518,000. The real estate purchase agreement states that he paid a little more than a third of the purchase price from his own funds, while the rest will be covered by the loan.
In addition to these properties, Lagumdžija inherited an apartment in Dubrovnik, Croatia, which was estimated to be worth BAM 290.000 ten years ago.
The Lagumdžija couple own two apartments, business space, and three parking lots in Sarajevo, which they bought in the period from 1999 to 2012 for nearly BAM 900,000.
Lagumdžija was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of BiH on two occasions and a member of the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH for four terms. He was the president of SDPBiH for almost a decade and a half.
Purchased inheritance
At the end of the first ministerial term in 2003, Lagumdžija, together with his father-in-law, Fahrudin Radonja, bought land in Poljine for BAM 90,000, with a dilapidated building on the foundations of which he later built a weekend house.
In 2006, 2010, and 2014 asset declarations, Lagumdžija listed this property as a property he inherited from his parents, in which he had been constantly investing.
However, in 2013, CIN reporters discovered that he has not inherited, but rather bought this property. He then said that he used part of the money from the sale of the inherited weekend house in Hotonj to buy the land and building in Poljine, which is why he listed it in the asset declaration as an inheritance.
The reporters then revealed that he did not state the exact amount of money invested in the construction of the weekend house and landscaping. In addition to the purchase price of BAM 90,000, Lagumdžija invested an additional BAM 240,000 for construction and real estate development, while in his asset declaration he estimated it at BAM 180,000.
He thought that he was not obliged to indicate the amount of investment in the construction, telling the reporters at the time that the asset declarations were nonsense. “Complete nonsense. Someone fills out a flat, another (fills out) something else, yet another (fills out) nothing. At the moment I took a stab at that number.”
Lagumdžija retired from politics in 2014 and focused on his teaching career and private business. At the Sarajevo School of Economics, he is the head of the Department of Management and Information Technology.
He soon founded the Foundation “Shared Societies and Values”, the seat of which is in his apartment on Ćemaluša Street, which he was awarded by the school.
Shortly after establishing the Foundation, he started a consulting company “L Tim” which, according to his account, “takes him the world around”.
During his political career, he stated that the bulk of his revenue comes from authorship rights and intellectual property fees. Also, he is a visiting professor at several international universities.
He also confirmed to have securities but did not want to reveal their value to reporters.
