Zoran Jankovic was born in 1953 in the small town of Saraorci in Serbia.  His mother was Slovenian. He became the president of Mercator in 1997, a large retail company in Slovenia.

In 2006, he became the mayor of Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, and turned out to be the first mayor of the city since WWII to enjoy two terms in office.

In October of 2011 he founded the Positive Slovenia party, which went on to win the majority of votes during the parliamentary elections of that year.  He subsequently relinquished his position as Mayor of Ljubljana.

A healthy career
Jankovic’s business career began in 1978 when he began working in the investment division of a government postal company called Post of Slovenia. In 1984 he became the acting director of Mercator Investa, a trade and tourism company. He subsequently became the general director of the company.

When Mercator Investa merged with Mercator Inženiring in 1988, he did not get the position as director of the newly formed company, so he decided to leave. From 1988 to 1990 he served as vice director of SOZD Emona. During this time he was also the acting director of Emona-VPS. When Emona failed to appoint him as director in 1990, he left and started his own interior design and civil engineering company called Electa. He remained in charge of Electa until 1997.

Jankovic and Mercator
Jankovic’s career took a remarkable turn in 1995 when he was appointed as a member of the Supervisory Board of Mercator. He represented the Slovenian Compensation Commission, led by then Slovenian Minister of Labour Tone Rop. Newspaper reports at the time indicated that his appointment was a result of lobbying by Peter Rigl, another member of the ruling party.

After Mercator Chairman Kazimir Zivko Pregelj was ousted by the Supervisory Board in 1997 following a debt scandal, Jankovic was appointed as his successor. His appointment was not without controversy: Minister Rop claimed in a 2002 television interview that it was his intervention that made Jankovic’s appointment possible. Both of them later downplayed the interview and insisted that the appointment was solely based on merit.
Whatever the case actually was regarding his appointment, Jankovic was able to transform Mercator into the largest retail company in the country, and one of the largest in the region.

During his tenure, the company was involved in a number of takeovers, the first of which was Klas in 1998.

Mercator opened its first hypermarket in August 1999 in the city of Siska. Jankovic quickly developed a reputation as a hands-on manager. He would, for example, not think it strange to help employees tidy up shopping carts

Mercator’s first international shops, in Sarajevo and Pula, opened in December of 2000, and in 2002 a huge store was opened in Beograd.

Jankovic started his second term at Mercator in 2003, but he was removed from the position in 2005 after two major suppliers acquired a 30 percent interest in the company.  He later accused Prime Minister Janez Janša of being involved in his dismissal.