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KPMG Peat Marwick Denies Cutting Deal with Karadzic
Karadzic announced earlier this month that he had signed the deal after meeting with a representative of Barents Group, a Washington-based subsidiary of Peat Marwick.
Peat Marwick spokesman George Ledwith said Wednesday that Barents would not undertake any privatization work in Srpska, the self-styled republic controlled by Bosnian Serbs, "until the government leadership issue there is resolved." He said talks had been held between an agent who is not an employee of Barents and the Institute for Privatization and Development in Bijeljina. He could not identify the agent nor the institute’s supporters. Bijeljina is a town in northeast Bosnia.
Ledwith said the discussions were inaccurately characterized as an agreement or contract. He said nothing was signed by Barents. "The institute has been notified that the mischaracterized agreement has been terminated by Barents Group effective immediately," he continued. "It is not our policy to deal with the current Bosnian Serb regime."
Ledwith’s comments went beyond a statement the company issued late Tuesday that said Barents would not do business with the current regime in Srpska, but did not deny that a deal had been signed. Karadzic did sign his first agreement with a foreign company, Intercam Investments AG, based in Switzerland. Earlier this month at a press conference in the former Yugoslavia, Karadzic said such agreements were very important for the stability of Srpska. He said the deal with Intercam Investments would help it develop energy resources, oil refineries and traffic communications.
Bernd Robertz, president of Intercam Investments, defended his company’s deal and Swiss officials said there was nothing illegal about the contract he signed. "We are not making contracts with single people, but governments," Robertz told The New York Times. "We handle medical supplies and do some engineering and consultancy work. We do not supply military equipment." He said it was too early to tell how large the contract would be and what equipment they would be supplying.
Karadzic said Intercam Investments was cooperating with Westinghouse, and that there might be generators and other Westinghouse parts for power plants in Srpska. But Roy Morrow, a spokesman for the Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse, said his company’s agreement with Intercam applies only to business development in Central Europe and Russia.
"There is nothing connected to the Bosnian Serb leadership," he said. "It is absolutely false."
Karadzic, a psychiatrist often called “the Doctor,” has set up headquarters in Pale, a former ski resort near Sarajevo. Despite being indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, he remains firmly in power.
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NEW YORK, May 29, (AP) -- The American accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwick
denied Wednesday that it had signed a business deal with Bosnian Serb
leader Radovan Karadzic, who is wanted for war crimes. The deal to help
privatize state-run enterprises, announced earlier this month by Karadzic,
would have defied a call by the Clinton administration that Americans
abstain from doing business with Bosnian Serb leaders. It also would have
marked the government’s first agreement with a U.S. company.
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