Dedinje the underground expands and deepens with thousands of new squares.
Below the ground building of imposing dimensions, owned by his wife in the most elite Belgrade neighborhood Zvonka Veselinović, godfather of the President of Serbia Nikola Petrovic and ex-wife Milan Radoičić, underground levels of even more impressive surfaces are emerging, which together will occupy more than 4.555 square meters of the village's depths, writes BIRN.
As the portal writes, thousands of new square meters are springing up in the area bounded by Prince Aleksandar Karađorđević Boulevard and Užički and Čakorski streets, under three villas belonging to people close to the top of the Serbian government - the wife of Zvonko Veselinović, the godfather of the Serbian President Nikola Petrović and the ex-wife of Milan Radoičić.
The deepest and most ambitious underground excavations are currently being carried out by Ljiljana Božović, the wife of Zvonko Veselinović.
New construction permits for larger square footage
With the new construction permit issued on January 16, 2025, as an investor of the building, instead of the previously permitted 1.716 gross square meters of the existing building, the construction of a significantly larger building is allowed - about 3.057 square meters.
According to the new permit, the gross area of the above-ground part of the building is about 812 square meters, which means that the underground part will have an area of even 2.245 square meters. Eight garage spaces are planned in that underground part, and the construction permit does not show what will be the purpose of the rest of that space.
BIRN writes that even the godfather of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, Nikola Petrović, is not far behind.
With the recently obtained change of location conditions, Nikola Petrović was allowed to expand the underground part of the villa he built in 2018 by adding more than 1.135 square meters.
This expansion comes about since City of Belgrade in June 2024, he bought a neighboring plot, which he then annexed to his existing plot on which the villa is located.
According to the changes in the location conditions from March 19 this year, the building gets an additional underground level, while the above-ground part remains unchanged.
The third building, as they say, is a villa located on the plot of the (former) wife of Milan Radoičić, covers 1.550 square meters, of which 556 are underground, in which the construction of garage spaces is not planned, and the purpose of the space is unknown. No requests for expansion were submitted for this villa, but some other changes took place on the plot - ownership changes.
Although Ema Radoičić testified in connection with the case Spa claimed that she divorced Milan back in 2017, cadastral data obtained by BIRN last year showed that the plot of land in Dedinje was registered as their joint, marital property after that period. Today it is run exclusively in her name.
Change of ownership of plots
BIRN journalists remind us that it is May 2024 wrote about plots which from the end of 2023 until May of the following year passed into the hands of Nikola Petrović, Ljiljana Božović and Milan Radoičić.
The plots were originally owned by the Danica Park company of Davor Macura, the owner of Alta Bank, who was associated with the ruling Serbian Progressive Party. At the time when BIRN wrote about these villas, the facilities on the plots owned by Radoičić and Veselinović's wife were already in various stages of construction.
Photos taken at the time show that certain buildings were almost finished even before the works were reported. Recently, Veselinović's wife and Petrović applied for and received the aforementioned permits for the expansion of the facilities.
Such grandiose underground expansion was made possible by the Amendments to the General Regulation Plan (GPR) of Belgrade, adopted at the end of 2023. They favor investors, because the underground floors are not included in the calculation of the built-up coefficient of the plot.
This gave them the opportunity to expand almost unlimited facilities underground, without affecting the official parameters of permitted construction. An above-ground building can have modest dimensions, while an object of imposing proportions rises below the ground.
Ljiljana Božović and Nikola Petrović are now using these benefits, adding thousands of square meters of underground space to their projects.
Read the entire text on the website BIRN-and.
Source: BIRN
