Ex-Premier Panic Returns to ICN Pharmaceuticals : Drugs: Founder of the Costa Mesa company gets back to business after serving as Yugoslav prime minister.

Ousted Yugoslav Premier Milan Panic said Tuesday that he is back in the driver’s seat at ICN Pharmaceuticals Inc., the Costa Mesa firm he founded, but will continue to look over his shoulder at events unfolding in his troubled homeland.

Speaking publicly for the first time since returning from a nine-month leave of absence, the ICN chairman and chief executive said: “I’m glad to be back. I am here to go back to my business.”

Panic took leave last summer to serve as prime minister of the Yugoslav federation made up of Serbia and Montenegro. He was ousted as prime minister in a no-confidence vote in December. Shortly afterward, he failed in an attempt to unseat rival Slobodan Milosevic as president of Serbia.

Speaking in characteristic upbeat terms, Panic said that he is more a businessman than a politician.

“I can run a company much more easily than I can a country,” Panic said during an hourlong press conference at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.

Echoing an idea he first proposed in an interview with The Times in January, Panic said that the best way to achieve peace in the Balkan region is to focus on economic integration rather than political solutions. He suggested that an economic summit be called soon so that those war-torn and former communist countries can begin forming their own economic bloc, an alliance similar to the European Community.

“The time for killing for ideas is over,” Panic said. “Economics is far more important than politics.”

But with ICN’s annual shareholder meeting coming up in May, Panic said, his main concern now is to resume control of the $1.5-billion conglomerate he said he has all but ignored in the last year.

Despite troubles in many Eastern European countries, Panic expressed confidence that his strategy of building a pharmaceuticals empire in Eastern Europe is still financially sound.

The company has struggled to overcome the effects of international economic sanctions on its Yugoslav joint venture, ICN Galenika, a drug manufacturer based in Belgrade. And the recent power struggle in Russia may also prove troublesome; ICN’s chief subsidiary, SPI Pharmaceuticals Inc., is negotiating a takeover of St. Petersburg-based Leningrad Industrial Chemical & Pharmaceutical Assn., also known as Oktyabr. The agreement is expected within a month, ICN officials say.