“Show me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are,” goes the old saying. Bojan Požar recently published a picture from a business forum in Luxembourg, in which Prime Minister Robert Golob is sitting with entrepreneur Dušan Olaj, and another gentleman is seen in the background – Milan Krajnc, apparently also an associate of Golob and his socialist government. Who is Krajnc? He says he is a knight, a Nobel Prize nominee in economics, and even a psychotherapist and book-writer. A brief search through his history reveals that he is anything but that.
On his website, Dr Milan Krajnc explains in a bragging fashion that he is a mentor and coach for personal and business success, while at the same time saying that he is an academic and university professor in the field of management, in addition to having a private practice in psychotherapy that he has been running for the last 15 years. He has been solving crisis situations in companies and family businesses for 20 years. He is said to have written more than 300 books on management and relationships. His Wikipedia page also tells us that in 2010, he ran for the presidency of the Slovenian Olympic Committee.
But after a little digging, we quickly realise that Dr Krajnc is not what he claims to be. He is one of Anthony Ritossa‘s key collaborators. And who is Ritosaa? Anthony Ritossa, the self-proclaimed “Sir Anthony”, may host lavish wealth conferences as an international financier and personal investment guru, but a year-long investigation by Vanity Fair magazine has exposed him as a fraud. Vanity Fair revealed that Ritossa is an Australian with a fictitious background who falsely claims to be the heir of the owner of a European olive oil company. He lures attendees to his events under dubious pretences, often only wanting their money. In addition, Ritossa has been married three times, has been imprisoned several times in Europe and is wanted for crimes in the US.
Ritossa’s get-togethers, attended by those seeking a get-rich-quick scheme, have raised questions about his true identity. Despite his claims, he has no credible financial background. The Vanity Fair investigation has exposed his deceptive practices and shed light on the true nature of this so-called master of “family wealth”.
Ritossa has organised international conferences where he has lectured on investment strategies to financiers, as well as to ordinary investors who want to get rich. People were convinced that they were attending events of the highest level and therefore paid substantial fees, based on Ritossa’s promise to offer them access to a mass of extremely wealthy investors. Instead, who they found there were a few people with money – but with little apparent interest in using it – and a contingent of “regular attendees” at the conferences, some of whom became like role-players: listening to presentations by hopeful entrepreneurs under the pretext of investing.
An American participant put it this way: “For a basic ticket, you need to pay around 5000 dollars. If you want meetings, it’s at least 18,000 dollars. I paid that twice, and they put me in front of people who had no money. A European businessman who also paid said, ‘There is nothing wrong with charging 200,000 dollars for an event if you get people with influence to invest. But we were sitting there with people who had nothing. People who were looking for money themselves.’”
So, it is a much more sophisticated form of fraud than the various Ponzi schemes. It is a promise of investment for entrepreneurs who want start-up or operating capital for their businesses, with Ritossa convincing them that they will be introduced at his meetings to the right people who can help them.
Krajnc was also a lecturer at Ritossa’s Lectures
But beware! One of the lecturers at Ritossa’s quasi-seminars is also Milan Krajnc, who apparently boasts a double PhD.
The alleged Nobel Prize nominee in economics appeared as a “VIP speaker” at one of Ritossa’s seminars in Monaco that took place between the 30th of June and the 2nd of July 2021. The Just Diligence website checked his titles, claiming that he was a Knight of Malta, Nobel Laureate and Dean of the Al-Khalifa Business School, and concluded that they were false and that the lecture was a fraud.
They mention that several “acquaintances” of the fraudster Ritossa have claimed to be Nobel laureates, and Krajnc has even attached some proof, which looks like an amateurishly made “Powerpoint” document converted into Word, where his (completely unknown) European Centre for Peace and Development in Belgrade (which strongly resembles various Slovenian “research institutes”) was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics.
His title of Knight of Malta also appears to be nothing but a hoax for the gullible, as it was bestowed on him by a pseudo-organisation based in New York, while the real Order of the Knights of Malta is based in Rome.
In the end, the Just Cause researchers concluded that it was all a hoax.
How did he find himself in the company of Golob?
It is a great mystery how such an individual, who has been declared an international swindler abroad, suddenly found himself in the company of Prime Minister Robert Golob. A whole host of questions arise. Who invited him? Does he know Golob from before? Has Golob actively participated in any of Anthony Ritossa’s frauds in the past, or was he perhaps a naive victim (using the taxpayers’ money)? Is Golob at least aware of the seminars Krajnc is participating in? How can it possibly happen that such a man appears at an official event together with the Prime Minister of an EU country, in the company of serious entrepreneurs?
This leaves us with more questions than answers. But the saying from the beginning is definitely true: “Show me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you who you are.” The question of who Robert Golob is is one that we Slovenians have been puzzling over for a year and a half. The more we learn about him, the more afraid we are.
Sara Kovač
