Vujin’s Vanished With The Cash

Fans who haven’t collected their refunds for a canceled Jose Carreras show at Belgrade Arena have little chance of seeing their money, according to the head of the company that sold the tickets.

Ticketline chief Dejan Dimitrijervic said he has handed back all the money his company was holding but fears that Serbian promoter Dragan Vujin has disappeared with the rest.

Dimitrijervic says he’s also puzzled how Vujin can call his company AEG without the Los Angeles-based promotion and venue giant taking notice.

About 500 fans look to have lost out when Vujin canceled the October 2 show at three days’ notice, saying he didn’t have enough time to ship in sound equipment from Germany.

Dimitrijervic arranged for refunds to begin October 15, giving Vujin time to return the money that had been advanced to him.

But Vujin didn’t return the money. He asked Dimitrijervic to send him the rest of it and said he would then deal with all refunds himself.

"In all of my 17 years of working in this business I have never come across a person who behaves in such an unprofessional way. It is in the contract that he should return all the money for Ticketline to make the refunds," Dimitrijervic said at the time.

His company has since given back all the box office takings it was holding and is now referring fans to Vujin, although neither Dimitrijervic nor the police have had contact with him for more than a month.

"I’m very disappointed because, at the beginning, the Belgrade police were very quick to act. But now the matter has been referred to the local police at Zrenjanin, and I’m not sure how much progress they are making," Dimitrijervic told Pollstar.

Vujin looks to have gone to ground with euro 50,000 and any money he may have got from corporate sales.

"Apart from the money we advanced from the box office, he also had a lot of promoter’s tickets that he could sell or give way to sponsors. I haven’t heard from him and so I don’t know what he’s done with them," Dimitrijervic explained.

"It’s cost us money and image to be involved in this but now I think the public understand that we are not responsible for it."

In the summer Vujin managed to get Artie Kornfeld to become associated with his Roadfest, a sort of Serbian Woodstock, until the co-founder of the original American Woodstock began to worry that he was being taken for a ride.

The acts got wise to the fact they were being advertised for a festival they hadn’t heard of, Kornfeld pulled out and the two-day open-air on a river island site at Zrenjanin was no more.

Vujin blamed "lack of support from the municipality of Zrenjanin and the government of Serbia."