Milan Panić

Milan Panić ( Serbian Cyrillic Милан Панић; born December 20, 1929 in Belgrade ) is a former Yugoslav cyclist, Serbian politician and an American businessman.

Life

Milan Panić studied biochemistry at the Universities of Belgrade and Heidelberg. He was a member of a Yugoslav Road Team. In 1956 he left Yugoslavia, founded in 1960 in Costa Mesa, California, the pharmaceutical company ICN, with whom he became a multimillionaire. He kept the Yugoslav citizenship, but got an additional 1963 U.S. citizenship. In 1991 he acquired the Serbian pharmaceutical company Galenika. ICN 1987 brought a drug to market, which should supposedly cure AIDS, but proved to be ineffective.

At the proposal of the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Dobrica Cosic, he was elected on 14 July 1992 as prime minister of the country. In December 1992, he ran unsuccessfully against Slobodan Milošević for the office of President of Serbia. On December 29, 1992, he was overthrown by a vote of no confidence. Shortly thereafter, he returned to California. He married nearly 40 years younger opera singer Milena Kitić, with whom he had a son born in 2001.