BELGRADE — Serbian authorities on Monday detained the owner of Alta Bank, one of the country's best-known private lenders, on suspicion that he siphoned money out of the bank in the days after the government that had favoured it lost power. Davor Macura, who began in business running a currency-exchange office before becoming a prominent banker, was given a 48-hour detention order on Monday, prosecutors said, the Associated Press reported from Belgrade.
Source: Associated Press via BytesEU
The detention came two days after Serbia's central bank, the National Bank of Serbia, revoked Alta Bank's operating licence in the early hours of Saturday, October 31, and launched bankruptcy proceedings to protect depositors, saying the bank's liquidity "has deteriorated significantly" and could worsen further. The Deposit Insurance Agency, which guarantees deposits of up to 50,000 euros (about $56,000 — yaani roughly 50 lakh rupees per depositor at recent rates), will act as the bank's bankruptcy administrator, the central bank said. Police searched the bank's offices for more than 30 hours from Saturday, according to Serbian media reports.
Source: Associated Press via BytesEU
Macura is suspected of illegally moving 45 billion Serbian dinars — about $428 million, yaani roughly 360 crore rupees — out of Alta Bank's vault, the AP reported, citing prosecutors. His businesses also span retail and construction. The Financial Times reported that Serbian officials said customers withdrew large amounts and transferred significant sums abroad in the days following last week's parliamentary election, and that people familiar with the matter said Macura had attempted to leave Serbia for Moscow after the vote. Macura has not publicly responded to that report.
Source: Financial Times via Eastora News
A bank that rose with Vucic — and fell a week after he lost
Alta Bank rose to prominence under the rule of former president Aleksandar Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party, which was ousted from power in a parliamentary election last week after 14 years in government, defeated by a student-led movement that had protested against alleged corruption and increasingly authoritarian rule. The lender had been used for some public utility payments during the previous government, the AP reported — one reason its sudden collapse, within days of the change of power, has become a test case for how deep the old system's business networks ran.
Source: Associated Press via BytesEU
The Russians' bank
Alta was a rare Serbian lender that allowed tens of thousands of Russian emigres to open personal and business accounts, the AP reported. Scores of Russians moved to Russia-friendly Serbia after Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and by the end of last year about 55,000 Russian nationals held residence permits in Serbia — more than ten times the pre-invasion number and the largest group of foreign nationals in the country, the Financial Times reported. People familiar with the matter told the FT that Alta played a significant role in facilitating money transfers into and out of Serbia for Russian individuals and companies after the invasion, and that the bank had previously come under European Central Bank scrutiny over suspected money laundering. Those are reported suspicions and matters under investigation, not established findings against the bank or its owner.
Source: Financial Times via Eastora News
Customers have been unable to withdraw money since the licence was revoked on Saturday. Pavel Belavin, a Russian journalist living in Belgrade and an Alta customer, told the Financial Times his accounts at the bank had been frozen since Saturday, and a financial consultant who emigrated from Russia said she had been receiving messages from distressed Russian clients who had kept all their family savings at the bank.
Source: Financial Times via Eastora News
Serbia's Public Prosecutor's Office for Organised Crime has called on authorities to investigate Alta's business operations, as well as responsible officials at the National Bank of Serbia, regarding potential outflows from Alta accounts and money transfers abroad, the FT reported. Macura is also one of four Serbian businessmen named in a request for US sanctions sent by Republican congressman Joe Wilson to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to Radio Free Europe's Balkan service, as reported in Serbian media coverage of the detention.
Source: Pollar News summary of Serbian media
What happens next
The 48-hour detention is the first step, not a verdict: prosecutors must decide whether to seek longer custody and file charges, and no charges had been announced when the reports were published. For depositors, the bankruptcy process under the Deposit Insurance Agency is supposed to protect savings up to the 50,000-euro guarantee. For Serbia's new government, the case is an early, highly visible move against a flagship business of the old order — and for the tens of thousands of Russians who banked with Alta because few others would take them, it is a frozen-accounts crisis with no quick answer.
Alta Bank sat at the crossing point of three big stories: the fall of Serbia's long-ruling party, the money routes Russians have used to live and bank outside the sanctions system since 2022, and European regulators' long-running questions about laundering through friendly jurisdictions. Its collapse — licence gone on Saturday, owner detained on Monday, $428 million allegedly moved — is the most dramatic banking failure in the Balkans in years.