Former football mogul and boss of Dinamo Zagreb, Zdravko Mamic, held a news conference on Tuesday in Bosnia's city of Mostar where he is avoiding capture by Croatian authorities. In the conference, reported by most Croatian media and held days after Croatia's Supreme Court upheld his sentencing verdict for siphoning €15m from the club, Mamic informed the public that he had now resigned from Dinamo's management.

“I am no longer a member of any body in Dinamo, and I am no longer employed at the club. My resignation is irrevocable,” Mamic said, adding that he would serve his six-and-a-half-years prison sentence in Bosnia and Herzegovina, “if a decision to that effect is made.”

Mamic, who holds dual Croatian and Bosnian citizenships, had fled to Bosnia and Herzegovina in June 2018, a day before a Croatian court in Osijek handed its verdict sentencing him to six and a half years in prison in a marathon case in which he was charged with siphoning funds from the club.

Attempts by Croatian authorities to get him extradited back to Croatia have failed, so Mamic lives in Bosnia as a free man, reportedly based in Medjugorje, the town made famous globally as a scene of regular apparitions of Virgin Mary.

On Monday, Croatia’s Supreme Court – whose decision is final – upheld the original verdict for Mamic. Verdicts for his two co-defendants were somewhat changed. The sentence to Zoran Mamic, who was the club’s manager until the ruling, was reduced from four years and 11 months to four years and eight months. Former tax official involved in the scam, Milan Pernar, also saw his sentence reduced, from four years and two months to three years and two months. Three-year prison sentence to former Dinamo director, Damir Vrbanovic, was also upheld.

Most of the money that Mamics were tried for had been siphoned through bogus annexes added to contracts transferred from Dinamo abroad, including Dejan Lovren who signed for Lyon in 2010, and Luka Modric, who signed for Tottenham in 2008.

Modric, who had made a deposition to investigators which later contradicted his court testimony, was later indicted for perjury, but the court dismissed the case.