Can-Do Entrepreneur Will Tackle Balkan War : Belgrade: Southland’s Milan Panic may have taken on his toughest task in agreeing to be Yugoslav premier.
If there’s one theme that runs through the life of Yugoslavia’s prime minister-designate, it’s this: He loves a challenge.
During the last half-century, Belgrade-born Milan Panic has waged war against the Nazi invaders of his homeland, successfully engineered his family’s escape from behind the Iron Curtain that enclosed communist Yugoslavia, and created an Orange County pharmaceutical conglomerate that tries to tackle problems like finding a cure for AIDS.
On Thursday, he agreed to take on what may be his toughest task: stopping the bloodshed in the region where he was born. Panic said at a Washington press conference that his first priority as prime minister would be to “stop the fighting” in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Thousands of people have looked to Panic (pronounced PAN-eesh) for salvation, ranging from AIDS patients in search of a wonder drug to citizens of Yugoslavia and its former republics caught in the cross-fire of ethnic warfare. Panic has relished the role.
“He is dedicated to the idea one person can make a difference,” said former Sen. Birch Bayh (D-Ind.), one of Panic’s closest confidants. “He is one of the most indefatigable human beings I have ever met.”
However, Panic and his firm--Costa Mesa-based ICN Pharmaceuticals--aren’t without their critics. The 62-year-old Panic has regularly butted heads with U.S. officials who have said that he promises more than he can deliver, like an effective treatment for the AIDS virus. His outspoken manner and hot temper have made him an all-too-visible target.
“He is a very unusual man. Very strong. Very manipulative,” one Justice Department official said. “He may be just what Yugoslavia needs.”
Panic has a virtual arsenal of influential friends.
Bayh, former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., former U.S. diplomat and publisher Francis Dale, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Charles T. Manatt and onetime Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Robert H. Finch have all helped him run ICN or its subsidiaries.
He has generously donated his time and money to their political careers, along with those of former President Jimmy Carter, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and Mayor Tom Bradley.
“Mr. Panic has had some run-ins with the federal bureaucracy, all of which he has basically won. He is a buccaneer, a two-fisted guy,” Brown said in an interview earlier this year. “He is an American success story.”
Television commentator Bill Press, a close friend of Panic, calls him “the Ross Perot of the Balkans.”
“Yugoslavians believe because he is an entrepreneur and a successful capitalist, he can work miracles with that government,” Press said.
Panic seems to agree. “On the economic side, I will pursue a rapid policy of privatization” modeled on the European subsidiary of ICN, he said in an article for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. “We made 5,000 new capitalists out of the workers by giving them shares in the company.”
Panic, who has not often given interviews, last week told Nathan Gardels, editor of Global Viewpoint, a feature of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, “I want to bring American-style democracy and a market economy to the country of my birth and youth.”
Asked who should bear the blame for the killing in the Balkans, he replied: “There is no question that the blame is on everybody. The most important thing is that people there stop shooting each other. Extremists who won’t stop shooting should be put in jail, whether they are Serbs, Muslim or Croat.”
With the breakup of the old Yugoslav federation, only two of its six former republics--Serbia and Montenegro--remain. The post of federal prime minister is not expected to have much power, since control of the army, the monetary system, security and foreign policy are believed to be in the hands of the Serbian strongman, President Slobodan Milosevic.
Even Panic himself could not have predicted 50 years ago that he would one day preside over a pharmaceutical giant with nearly half a billion dollars in sales and take home a $6-million annual salary, only to return to the place where he started.
Biographical materials furnished by Panic indicate that he was only 3 when his father died. He raised vegetables as a youngster during the 1930s in Belgrade to help support his mother and two sisters.
“I used to wake up in the dark and sit on the steps outside my house. My mother would come out and ask, ‘What are you doing?’ ” he told an interviewer. “I would tell her that I was waiting for the sun to come up so I could go to work.”
By 1944, Panic had joined a band of guerrillas led by Josip Broz Tito to oust German forces that had invaded three years earlier. Panic was only 14 at the time.
Following the end of World War II, Panic enrolled in a Belgrade university and spent his spare time cycling. He eventually became an alternate on Yugoslavia’s Olympic team.
Panic defected on a team outing in 1955. The Panic family arrived in the United States in 1956, carrying two suitcases and $20. He worked as a research assistant in the chemistry department at USC in the late 1950s before starting ICN in 1960 with $200 and a washing machine.
Today, ICN Pharmaceuticals and its subsidiaries employ 6,300 people worldwide. One of ICN’s subsidiaries merged in 1990 with Yugoslavia’s largest drug company, Galenika Pharmaceuticals. ICN sells 600 prescription drugs to more than 60 countries for the treatment of a variety of maladies, including cancer, arthritis and cardiovascular disease.
Panic’s reputation is that of a strong and forceful leader who doesn’t let anything or anyone get in his way. He can be particularly stern with employees, routinely raising his voice at them.
ICN became embroiled in controversy in large part because of Panic’s premature claims in early 1987 that one of its drugs, ribavirin, was an effective treatment for AIDS. That year, Panic called the head of the Food and Drug Administration “the jerk commissioner” and said he was being persecuted by federal agencies.
“In all my mature life, I have tried to come up with medicine to help people,” he told The Times in an interview published that year. “I’m being crucified, and I can’t believe it. . . . All I can say is, ‘Forgive them, God, for they know not what they do.’ ”
The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Panic last year for securities fraud, claiming he knowingly misled the public about ribavirin. Three years before, a federal grand jury began investigating allegations that ICN illegally offered to sell ribavirin as a treatment for AIDS without government approval.
Panic and ICN quickly settled the SEC suit--without admitting or denying wrongdoing--by signing a consent decree in which they agreed not to violate future securities laws. The criminal investigation was dropped in exchange for a $600,000 civil settlement last year, although the company and Panic did not admit any wrongdoing.
