Milan Panić dies at 96: former Yugoslav prime minister and founder of ICN Pharmaceuticals

Milan Panić, former prime minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and a U.S. businessman of Serbian origin, has died at the age of 96. The news was reported by the Nova.rs portal at 00:37 on September 26, 2026.

Panić was the founder of ICN Pharmaceuticals, a World War II veteran and a champion cyclist. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, then-president Dobrica Ćosić offered him the prime minister’s mandate, which Panić took in July 1992 as the first prime minister of the FR of Yugoslavia.

In December 1992 he ran against Slobodan Milošević as an independent candidate, with the informal support of the DEPOS opposition, in the Serbian presidential elections, winning 32% of the vote. A few months later he resigned and withdrew from Serbian politics, but in the years that followed he earned a reputation in Western public opinion as one of Milošević’s fiercest critics.

Born in Belgrade on December 20, 1929, Panić joined the Yugoslav resistance movement in World War II as a teenager, and after the war competed in cycling at the highest Yugoslav levels. In the 1950s he left communist Yugoslavia and settled in the United States, where in 1959 in California he founded the company that became ICN Pharmaceuticals — an international pharmaceutical company best known for developing and commercializing antiviral drugs. The company later became Valeant Pharmaceuticals and ultimately Bausch Health — according to Nova.rs.