Stanko Subotić (; born 9 September 1959) is a Serbian businessman and the founder and owner of the Luxembourg-based holding company EMI Group (Emerging Marketing Investments APS) which owns Moj Kiosk Group and the French holding company Louis Max. To the public, Subotić was known as a close friend of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić and an active supporter of the democratic opposition in Serbia while Slobodan Milošević was still in power. For this, he had faced oppression by the Milošević regime and decided to leave Serbia in 1997. Later, he supported pro-European reforms steered by the Đinđić government. In 2003, after the assassination of Zoran Đinđić, and during the rule of his political opponents Vojislav Koštunica and Boris Tadić, the government administration set in motion a politically motivated process against Subotić, indicting him for alleged abuse of office. In spite of a strong media campaign against him, he was acquitted of all charges at the end of 2015 by the Court of Appellation in Belgrade. Early life and education Subotić comes from a working-class family in which he is the sixth and youngest child. As a teenager, he worked in his father's carpentry shop. He graduated from the High School of Economics in Ub, where he also met his future wife Jagoda. Business career In 1979, Subotić left for France to work for a company owned by one of his friends. By 1981, he opened his first business - a chain of clothing boutiques that focused on wholesale. During the mid-1980s, Subotić invested in Serbia and returned to Yugoslavia in 1989, during the reforms campaign led by Ante Marković. In 1991, he founded a company named MIA in Belgrade, which operated as a chain of boutiques and was supported by two ready-to-wear clothing factories. In 1992, due to extraordinary economic circumstances in the country, Subotić accepted a contingent of cigarettes as payment for an apparel shipment. This led him into the cigarette trading business in 1995. At the time, Subotić owned two duty-free shops at a border crossing with North Macedonia and one at the sea port Bar in Montenegro. In 1996, Subotić became the exclusive distributor of British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco for South-East Europe, expanding with distribution for SEITA and R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in 1997. His cigarette trading business was initially based in Serbia, but after the murders of Radovan Stojičić and Vlada Kovačević in