The Beginnings

After fifty years, for the first time in Yugoslavia the conditions were created for the establishment of a financial and capital market. The adoption of the Law on Securities and the Law on the Money Market and the Capital Market at the end of 1989, enabled the creation of the capital market institutions.

The Securities Commission was founded in January 1990, pursuant to the Law on Securities (Official Gazette SFRY No 64/89 (and 29/90)) by the Decision of the Federal Government about the composition, scope of work and methods of work of the Commission, dated 11 January 1990.

Milovan Milutinović, PhD was the first Chairman of the Securities Commission. The first session was held on 16 February 1990, when the Decision on Granting Approval for the Beginning of Work of the Capital Market in Yugoslavia was adopted. The first rulebook was adopted several months after that: the Rulebook on conditions for approvals of long-term securities on 26 June 1990, when as a second Chairman Stojan Dabić, PhD was leading the Commission.

Among its first activities, on the tenth session held on 25 December 1990, the then Commission adopted an initiative to establish and introduce new subjects into curricula of faculties of law and economics. Namely, the initiative was to introduce the subject Banking and Stock Exchange Law in faculties of law and to introduce the subject Securities and their market in the faculties of economics.

The United States of America have the longest tradition in the world in regulation of capital markets. The Securities and Exchange Commission in USA was founded back in 1934, and our Securities Commission was organized to emulate its structure and arrangement.

The Securities Commission started its work in 1990 when it issued decisions and measures which applied to the whole region of the former Yugoslavia. It granted approvals and licenses to the first stock exchanges in the region: Belgrade, Lјubljana, Sarajevo and Podgorica Stock Exchanges, in the period from 1990 to 1994.

The constitutive session of the Capital Market of Yugoslavia, founded by 32 largest banks in the ex-Yugoslavia region, was held in 1989. The Belgrade Stock Exchange was founded in 1990. The Belgrade Stock Exchange is the legal successor of the the Belgrade Stock Exchange founded in 1894 which had stopped its work in April 1941, with the onset of the II World War.

The image right is a scan of the first decision adopted at the constitutive session granting a license to the Yugoslavia Capital Market with a photo of the first Chairman Milovan Milutinović.