people. One of the recipients of these letters was Bane’s paternal uncle, Spiro Kostic. On 7 November 1984 Bane wrote to him in the following terms: “Dear Uncle Spiro, Since June I move around like a Bedouin from one relative to the next. I just made it out of Switzerland because the wife of my noble father and her daughter tried, and still try today, to incapacitate and eliminate me, so as to hide their bad deeds and their blackest sin. Poor dear Papa Milan, your brother. Now it is clear to me, after a lot of time, who was really responsible for the arguments between you and dad. He died poorer and did not understand.” On Christmas Day 1984 Bane wrote again to Uncle Spiro, saying he had not received a reply to his earlier letter: “Why? Do you belong to the same group, if so, God shall reward you as appropriate.” Unsurprisingly, after receiving these letters, her uncle called Jovanka in a state of desperation to ask what had happened to Bane. 71. In her witness statement Jovanka goes on to describe how, as a result of his behaviour, Bane had to leave the family home and then embarked on his nomadic existence. She tried to invite Bane to come and visit her, and wrote to him in affectionate terms. However, he did not reply to the invitation, and became increasingly hostile to his family. After 1985, he never spoke to his mother again. He would still telephone Jovanka regularly, but repeatedly accused her of poisoning him and would often refer to her as “Dr Mengele”. Jovanka also discovered around this time that Bane had withdrawn all the money from their joint account. This prompted her to instruct a lawyer, and in November 1984 she wrote to Bane saying that it was no longer appropriate for them to have assets under their joint control and proposing a formal division of assets on an agreed basis. She offered to come to London for that purpose. 72. Bane did not respond to this letter immediately, but in the summer of 1985 he telephoned Jovanka to say that they were clever enough to reach an agreement between themselves without having to go through lawyers, and inviting her to come to London. This she did in August 1985, and a number of informal meetings took place at the Serbian Othodox Church, at least one of which Mirjana also attended, at which agreement was reached on a division of family assets between Bane and Jovanka on the one hand, and Bane and his mother on the other hand, in each case with the agreement of Mirjana who was by this stage in the process of negotiating her own divorce settlement with Bane. The agreement was evidently recorded in a formal document, which no longer survives. One of the terms of the agreement, as I have already mentioned, was that the Gleneagles property should be transferred from Jovanka to Zoran, who received a gift of £50,000 from his grandmother in order to enable him to buy the property from Jovanka for £47,000.

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