A fashion model and her mother, who once lived at the Hollywood home of filmmaker Orson Welles, are embroiled in an embezzlement case that has kept Serbian prosecutors busy for six years.
Between March 2006 to April 2010, Serbian model Katarina Rebrača, her mother, Sandrini Bogunović, and two of their associates, allegedly embezzled 37 million dinars (roughly U.S. $336,000) from a charity established to educate women about breast cancer prevention, according to the indictment.
The defendants face 12-year prison sentences.
The 44-year-old Rebrača, who was born in New York, spent part of her childhood residing at Welles’ home. Her mother, Bogunović, was a witness on a hotly contested legal document during the 1986 court battle between Welles’ mistress, Croatian actress Oja Kodar, and his widow, Italian countess Paola Mori.
Bogunović, who worked as an actress and later flight attendant, was deported from the U.S. years after Welles’ death for organizing the sale of pieces of art on transAtlantic flights. A participant in several other alleged scams, Bogunović is prohibited from entering the U.S., Austria, Germany and Sweden, according to Belgrade media reports.
Serbian law enforcement have accused Bogunovic of masterminding the cancer charity embezzlement.
However, during her most recent court appearance Rebrača denied that money from the humanitarian fund that bore her name was used by for personal purposes. Rather, she blamed any malfeasance on the late Nenad Borojević, the former director of the Institute for Oncology and Radiology.
Borojević, who had been under investigation in an unrelated pharmaceutical scam, committed suicide in January 2012.
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