Dragan Šolak

Dragan Šolak is a Serbian businessman and media mogul who owns dozens of companies in Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece and the Netherlands.

Šolak is the founder and a member of the advisory board of the United Group, which includes SBB, the leading cable operator in Serbia. His career began in 1990 with the establishment of the production company VANS. The first film produced by VANS was Goran Paskaljevic's Tango Argentino, and the company went on to produce Byzantine Blue and Barrel of Gunpowder. Šolak left Serbia in 1992 and VANS became a distribution company in 1996. In the early 2000s, he founded SBB, and seven years later United Group by merging SBB and Telemach from Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, it was United Group's creation of N1 Television in 2014 - one of the few media outlets in the country that is not under the financial or political influence of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party - that brought him to public attention. In an interview with the Guardian, Šolak said that he was not interested in politics and that he had only become a political figure because he did not allow the authorities to dictate how his television would operate. According to the Serbian Business Registers Agency, Dragan Šolak has a 35% stake in many companies within the United Group, making him a co-owner of dozens of companies in Serbia: SBB, Direct media, D express, United cloud, Grand production, Shoppster, Cas Media, United media production, United group RS, Adria news, Mainstream, Media point, Direct media communications, United media digital, Dan Graf, Mainstream public cloud services, City media, Dansav plaza, Holdco Adria, Netlogic, Techhill plaza, United group network infrastructure, Big print, Fortuna e-sports, Fusion communications, Ali invest, Brainz, Panelcatv, Flamactis, Grand slam group, Hiša plus, TV channel Ultra Beograd (in liquidation), N1 television, Nova S television.

The most successful of these companies in 2022 was SBB, with a turnover of about EUR 252 million and a profit of almost EUR 35 million. Direct Media came second in terms of profit, with EUR 1.9 million.

In 2022, Šolak became the leading investor in Sport Republic, a London-based investment company in the sports and entertainment industry, and in January 2022 Sport Republic bought the British Premier League football club Southampton FC, followed by the purchase of Goztepe in Turkey in August 2022.

The British Guardian, which gave one of the few interviews to Šolak after his purchase of Southampton, reported that his fortune is estimated at £1.4 billion. A passionate golfer, Šolak owns a golf course in Slovenia and the United Group website says he is involved in charity work, investing in education, environmental protection, art and culture.